It’s been a horrifying week. Wednesday’s Congressional certification and counting of Electoral College votes was already unusual in that anyone was paying attention to this typically-routine step in the democratic process. As Trump spoke to a crowd outside the White House, Francesca Tripodi offered context on how he’d built the narrative of election fraud over the months before the election, noting “it's more complicated than just ‘my side lost so I think it's a fraud.’”
We watched armed rioters break into the Capitol building and threaten the certification of votes, and as many others watching expressed surprise and disbelief, CITAP researchers helped to put the attack in context. Tressie McMillan Cottom described watching the media’s understanding of events change even as they covered them:
Zeynep Tufekci added to a conversation thread she’d kicked off the day prior with a piece that suggested “When the president of the United States calls up electoral officials to threaten them, he’s leveling a loaded gun at our democracy.”
Deen Freelon commented on observers just beginning to understand the ongoing role of white supremacy in American politics:
Daniel Kreiss offered recommendations for media covering the day’s events:
Wednesday’s events felt surprising and unprecedented to many watching. As scholars of democracy, communication, technology, and society, we’re committed to helping make sense of the threats to multiracial democracy—and where possible, solutions.
Essential reading, watching, and listening
“Political sectarianism in America,” Science
“More recently, researchers have identified a second type of polarization, one focusing less on triumphs of ideas than on dominating the abhorrent supporters of the opposing party.”
“The insurrection at the Capitol challenged how US media frames unrest and shapes public opinion,” The Conversation
“News audiences aren’t necessarily used to seeing violence and disruption at citizen demonstrations in support of a president – and certainly not on the scale we witnessed on Wednesday at the Capitol. It proved a novel test of how the news media would frame the unrest and the aims of those involved.”
“The Insurrectionist Looting of America,” The Open Mind Podcast
“UNC professor of law Carissa Byrne Hessick explains how and why the authoritarian incitement of domestic terrorism to overturn the election is different from violent episodes during the BLM protests.”
“A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists” The New York Times
“The failures of neutral objective journalism across several beats in the news media are countless. And these shortcomings have real consequences for the readers we are sworn to serve — particularly black readers, who we know are more likely to have interactions with the criminal justice system (whose leaders we court), more likely to be the targets of white supremacists (whom we commonly indulge) and more likely to have lives made more difficult by racist politicians and implicitly racist policies that we repeatedly refuse to call out.”
“No on Brandenburg,” PrawfsBlawg
“The words spoken matter--they must explicitly or implicitly encourage lawless action, allowing for rhetorical hyperbole, overstatement, and even offensiveness.”
From the CITAP archives
Our research illuminates the roots of our current moment and suggests some of the work ahead in repairing American democracy. Digging back into our own public-facing work, we offer insight into how and why right-wing media share disinformation, the role of platforms in amplifying these movements, and
How and why disinformation thrives
Deen Freelon, Alice Marwick, and Daniel Kreiss, “False equivalencies: Online activism from left to right,” Science
“ideological asymmetries between left- and right-wing activism hold critical implications for democratic practice, social media governance, and the interdisciplinary study of digital politics.”
Francesca Tripodi, “How Trump Voters Decide Who to Trust,” GEN on Medium
“Implying that Trump supporters were tricked into voting for him because they don’t know what truth looks like sets them up as cultural dopes instead of conceptualizing conservatives as an active audience.”
(Or read the full study at Data & Society)
Alice Marwick and Will Partin, “QAnon shows that the age of alternative facts will not end with Trump” Columbia Journalism Review
“While many conspiracies encourage readers to doubt mainstream sources, QAnon takes things one step further by building an entire knowledge-making institution of its own. And that takes some serious effort.
QAnon does the work of constructing alternative facts. And just as individual pieces of data must be validated in mainstream institutions through processes like peer review and reproducibility, QAnon researchers have found a means of validating their own claims in their interpretation of the world.”
Daniel Kreiss and Shannon McGregor, “Americans Are Too Worried About Political Misinformation,” Slate
This is not to say that misinformation is something nobody should worry about. It’s that the factual element shouldn’t be the focus. Journalists and voters should pay more attention to the motivations, content, and drivers of mis- and disinformation. Research on those examines how people might share information, regardless of its factual basis, to forge collective identity with others, how actors strategically utilize racial divisions to further disinformation, and how far-right groups manipulate the media to spread radicalizing conspiracy theories, in turn driving misguided searches for “the truth.” Research in this vein helps explain why and how certain groups in this country seek to deepen political and social divides, at times using misinformation as a tool.
How platforms contribute
Becca Lewis, “I warned in 2018 YouTube was fueling far-right extremism. Here's what the platform should be doing,” The Guardian
“The great irony is that by attempting to stay apolitical, YouTube consistently makes the political choice not to care about or protect vulnerable communities.”
Zeynep Tufekci, “It's the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech,” Wired
The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all. They look like viral or coordinated harassment campaigns, which harness the dynamics of viral outrage to impose an unbearable and disproportionate cost on the act of speaking out. They look like epidemics of disinformation, meant to undercut the credibility of valid information sources. They look like bot-fueled campaigns of trolling and distraction, or piecemeal leaks of hacked materials, meant to swamp the attention of traditional media.
Zeynep Tufekci, “How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump,” MIT Technology Review
If digital connectivity provided the spark, it ignited because the kindling was already everywhere. The way forward is not to cultivate nostalgia for the old-world information gatekeepers or for the idealism of the Arab Spring. It’s to figure out how our institutions, our checks and balances, and our societal safeguards should function in the 21st century—not just for digital technologies but for politics and the economy in general. This responsibility isn’t on Russia, or solely on Facebook or Google or Twitter. It’s on us.
The role of whiteness
Tressie McMillan Cottom, “The Problem With Obama's Faith in White America” The Atlantic
It didn’t matter that Obama had faith in white people; they needed only to have faith in him: in his willingness to reflect their ideal selves back at them, to change the world without changing them, to change blackness for them without being black to them.
Repairing the damage: where do we start?
Tressie McMillan Cottom, “The Danger in White Moderates Setting Biden’s Agenda,” The New York Times
Restoring baseline trust in social institutions’ survivability, and not necessarily their fairness, is critical to the integrity of governance. A President Biden should pursue all available avenues of punishment. Only a transparent accounting of what exactly happened during the last four years would allow us to pivot to radical responsiveness.
Daniel Kreiss and Mike Ananny, “Put Trump's Tweets on a Time Delay”, Wired
“…when it comes to political and health disinformation, political elites matter the most. As decades of political science has taught us, people often take their cues from political leaders; they have outsized influence on public attitudes. Even more, such a high-profile test run of these systems on political elites in the US might help these companies figure out how to create a generalized post-delay system to ensure the integrity of their platforms’ policies.”
What are you following?
Going forward, we’ll continue to build out reading recommendations that illuminate what’s happening and how we can effectively counter these attacks. If you have recommendations to add, please use the comment bubble to share what you’re reading, watching, or listening to.