Computational Propaganda

For a long time, politicians struggled to make sense of social media. Then in one electoral season, bots, blogs, YouTube posts and other types of social media amplifiers turned election projections, referenda, and the political landscape upside down. What you thought you knew about the political process is wrong. You have been misinformed. Read this excellent book and find out why.

Auteur

Samuel C. Woolley is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin.

Philip N. Howard is Director and Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute at University of Oxford.

They are the co-founders of the Computational Propaganda Project. This research endeavour is focused on the study of the manipulation of public opinion via online spaces. The project is based at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford.

Texte du rabat

Social media platforms do not just circulate political ideas, but support computational propaganda and manipulative disinformation campaigns. Although some of these disinformation campaigns are carried out directly by individuals, most are waged by software, commonly known as bots, programmed to perform simple, repetitive, robotic tasks. Including case studies from nine countries and covering propaganda efforts over a wide array of social media platforms, this book argues that bots, fake accounts, and social media algorithms amount to a new political communications mechanism that it terms "computational propaganda."

Résumé
Social media platforms do not just circulate political ideas, they support manipulative disinformation campaigns. While some of these disinformation campaigns are carried out directly by individuals, most are waged by software, commonly known as bots, programmed to perform simple, repetitive, robotic tasks. Some social media bots collect and distribute legitimate information, while others communicate with and harass people, manipulate trending algorithms, and inundate systems with spam. Campaigns made up of bots, fake accounts, and trolls can be coordinated by one person, or a small group of people, to give the illusion of large-scale consensus. Some political regimes use political bots to silence opponents and to push official state messaging, to sway the vote during elections, and to defame critics, human rights defenders, civil society groups, and journalists. This book argues that such automation and platform manipulation, amounts to a new political communications mechanism that Samuel Woolley and Philip N. Noward call "computational propaganda." This differs from older styles of propaganda in that it uses algorithms, automation, and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks while it actively learns from and mimicks real people so as to manipulate public opinion across a diverse range of platforms and device networks. This book includes cases of computational propaganda from nine countries (both democratic and authoritarian) and four continents (North and South America, Europe, and Asia), covering propaganda efforts over a wide array of social media platforms and usage in different types of political processes (elections, referenda, and during political crises).

Contenu

• Part I: Theoretical Introduction and Analytical Frame

• Introduction: Computational Propaganda Worldwide

• Chapter 1 - Russia: The Origins of Digital Misinformation

• Chapter 2 - Ukraine: External Threats and Internal Challenges

• Chapter 3 - Canada: Building Bot Typologies

• Chapter 4 - Poland: Unpacking the Ecosystem of Social Media Manipulation

• Chapter 5 - Taiwan: Digital Democracy Meets Automated Autocracy

• Chapter 6 - Brazil: Political Bot Intervention During Pivotal Events

• Chapter 7 - Germany: A Cautionary Tale

• Chapter 8 - United States: Manufacturing Consensus Online

• Chapter 9 - China: An Alternative Model of a Widespread Practice

• Conclusion: Political Parties, Politicians, and Computational Propaganda

• Index