By: Zachey Kliger

In his inaugural address on January 20, President Joe Biden highlighted truth decay as among the nation’s foremost challenges: “We face an attack on democracy and on truth,” Biden warned.

Today, one in four U.S. adults refuse to get a coronavirus vaccine, despite ample data proving the vaccines’ safety and efficacy. An even larger share of the U.S. population deny the 2020 Presidential election results. And objective truths – from climate science to Russian interference in recent elections – continue to be widely disputed.

How did we arrive at the present state of information disorder? 

That is the central question of Network Propaganda (2018), a book by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts, professors at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

Their analysis of millions of news stories and social media posts between 2015-2018 led them to conclude that none of the putative actors – Russians, fake news entrepreneurs, Cambridge Analytica, or Facebook itself – are the major causes of disruption. Instead, the authors point to a media ecosystem – borne of long-term political and cultural forces – that features an insular right-wing and a dearth of center-right news sources as the primary driver of disinformation and propaganda in the American public sphere.

“Our study suggests that we should focus on the structural, not the novel; on the long-term dynamic between institutions, culture and technology, not only the disruptive technological moment.”

The authors describe how a set of technological innovations, starting with FM radio and cable, and then later the internet and social media, have been adopted by two communities in the United States in radically different ways. In the 1980’s, the deregulation of cable and elimination of the FCC’s fairness doctrine – a policy which required broadcasters to present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that was honest, equitable and balanced – created the institutional conditions for divergent organizational strategies. 

On the right, Rush Limbaugh proved the commercial viability of selling ideologically pure messages that expressed a shared sense of outrage and loss in a fast-changing world. Fox News followed in 1996, delivering identity-confirming news around the clock to tens of millions of viewers, while denigrating the veracity of all other outlets. More recently, Infowars, Breitbart, Newsmax, and the Daily Caller have emerged as popular right-wing outlets. In all, Benkler, Faris and Roberts estimate that 25-30 percent of the U.S. population attends purely to this right-wing media ecosystem.

Democrats, by contrast, lacked a sufficiently large and homogenous group to develop a similarly successful strategy rooted in ideological purity.

“The coalition the Democrats represented was too diverse to support a single entity like Fox, or Rush Limbaugh in the late 1980s to mid-1990s. Its constituents spread their attention across too many outlets to sustain efforts, like MSNBC, to replicate the strategy that had succeeded so well on the right.”

To this day, Democrats and liberals consume a wider array of media sources than Republicans, and don’t trust any one source as much as Republicans trust Fox News. They consume traditional journalistic outlets, as well as new, online-only, and partisan media. 

Benkler, Faris and Roberts argue that there is a profound asymmetry between the propaganda feedback loop that typifies the right-wing medio ecosystem, and the reality-check dynamic that typifies the rest of the media system.

“Despite extensive efforts, we were unable to find an example of disinformation or commercial clickbait started on the left that took hold and became widely reported and believed in the broader network that stretches from the center to the left for any meaningful stretch of time.”

According to Benkler, Faris and Roberts, partisan efforts to circulate disinformation outside of the right-wing media ecosystem have failed because fact-checking norms and journalistic institutional commitments dampen the diffusion and amplification of disinformation in the mainstream media ecosystem. These dynamics are inverted in the insular right-wing, in which partisan identity-confirming assertions are accelerated and amplified.

The central argument of Network Propaganda – that the root cause of our current disinformation epidemic is not technological, but rather political and cultural – is compelling. It serves as a reminder that the internet is not inherently divisive, and technology is not destiny. Different political systems, coming from different historical trajectories and institutional traditions, will likely exhibit different effects of the same technologies.

My issue lies not with the authors’ diagnosis, but rather with their prescriptions. In their view, technocratic solutions, like regulating internet platforms, will fail to address a problem that is fundamentally of a political and cultural making. 

“Solutions that are based on imagining that Facebook, or bots, or the Russians are the core threat, will likely miss their mark… regulation informed by misdiagnosis, aimed at the wrong targets, will almost certainly lead to over censorship.”

Instead, Benkler, Faris and Roberts emphasize the need for professional journalism, and call on people with conservative credentials within the right-wing sphere to speak out against disinformation. 

“A more foundational change is that Republican leaders recognize the dangers that the propaganda feedback loop poses to American democracy, and find a way to lead their party and voters out of it. Only those who have credibility and power within the partisan media sphere stand a chance of breaking the destructive cycle.”

Benkler, Faris and Roberts also propose a reconstruction of center-right media, and public funding for reliable professional media and media literacy education, among other measures.

Any of these would be welcome reforms. Yet, each seem less promising today than they did at the time of the book’s publication. 

Last month, Liz Cheney was ousted from her house GOP leadership position for refusing to embrace the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. GOP State legislatures have moved to push voter suppression bills in Texas, Florida, Georgia, and other states – all based on the debunked claim of widespread voter fraud. Rather than retreat from Trumpism, paranoia and conspiracy, party leaders are moving the party further to the right. 

Attempts to fill the void in center-right media, by outlets like the Bulwark, the Federalist and others, have hardly made a dent in Fox News’ monopoly over conservative audiences.

 And the pandemic has crystallized the need for immediate solutions to the problem of disinformation; long-term investments in media literacy, or institutional changes, like a viable third political party, will take time to materialize.

The authors’ focus on the political-institutional underpinnings of the present disinformation dilemma led them to understate the potential impact of commonsense internet regulations.

For a large share of Fox viewers, Facebook is the only other consistent source of news. And Facebook and Google’s capacity to leverage big-data techniques to provide individually tailored, targeted communication to manipulate the beliefs and attitudes of users is unmatched by cable networks or talk radio. 

Fortunately, two bills have already been drafted at the federal level that could limit the spread of disinformation on Facebook. 

In March, Congressman Tom Malinowski (NJ-7) and Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (CA-18) re-introduced the Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act. The legislation would hold social media platforms accountable for algorithmic amplification of harmful, radicalizing content, and compel Facebook to ensure greater neutrality of sources in users’ newsfeeds.

The Honest Ads Act, introduced by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mark Warner (D-VA), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), would require disclaimers on all paid advertising on Facebook. This would allow users to see who is paying for political ads, and judge them accordingly. 

Facebook didn’t create the asymmetric architecture of the American public sphere described in Network Propaganda. But regulating Facebook remains the most practical course to dampen the impact of disinformation.

Zachey Kliger (MPA ‘22) is the Editor-in-Chief of The Morningside Post. He is studying Social Policy with a specialization in Technology, Media, and Communications.