The Rise of Weaponized Flak in the New Media Era. Brian Michael Goss

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СКАЧАТЬ to audience demographics and psychographics, beginning with the audience’s class characteristics (Hesmondhalgh, 2010, pp. 288–289).

      Theorizations of media power that Des Freedman (2014) dubs “control models” assume strong media effects (audience moved this way and that, as if by joystick)—and they have long been marginal in media studies. Indeed, by the twenty-first century, investigators gleefully turned control models on their heads; audiences were not controlled by mass media, in this view, but had become increasingly important producers of discourse. Dan Gillmor’s We the media (2004) and Clay Shirky’s Here comes everybody (2008) insist on utopian hopes come true on new media platforms. The global brain’s crowd wisdom was posited as plugged in and the so-called ex-audience had commandeered the printing presses. In Bloggers on the bus, Eric Boehlert (2009) envisions news media’s monopoly on insider-oriented news as broken, to the benefit of independent journalism and a better-informed public. Sophisticated blogs, such as Glenn Greenwald’s Unclaimed territory, could and did attract audiences of hundreds-of-thousands in startlingly short intervals (Boehlert, 2009, pp. 179–192), a democratization of the printing press not previously observed.

      As is now more widely appreciated, new media has also unleashed a regime of fine print (Sterne, 2012), appropriation by illiberal regimes (Morozov, 2011) and Stasi-plus surveillance (Goodman, 2015). Moreover, after a couple of decades of shakeout, new media has replicated many of the features (concentration of wealth, power and audiences) of the dinosaur media that it ostensibly supplanted (Fuchs, 2014). Twentieth-century media was mass media and it attempted to synchronize a collective heartbeat for society through shared mediated experience that reached most all of society—a Sisyphean task, for reasons given. However, in a neoliberal era of pervasive audience surveillance and mass customization/market segmentation (Andrejevic, 2004), there is no logic to even support an effort to convene the whole nation together. Instead, “killer facts” and narratives effectively seek out their audience niches. On social media, unwanted or jarring messages can be shunted off by the silent work of the algorithmic filter bubble that is, in turn, fueled by data mining toward finely-grained audience segmentation. As Delia Dumitrica observes, the tailoring of messages on Facebook is relentless and creates an apparently seamless ecosystem glossed as one’s preferred, “natural” habitat: “My identity, my friends, my world: the Facebook mediated global imaginary rests upon (the ←27 | 28→illusion of) choice. Today, choice is the epitome of agency, as well as a core neoliberal value” (Dumitrica, 2016, p. 199).

      In turn, audience surveillance for purposes of prediction and control has achieved very high levels of sophistication. Facebook “Likes” furnish a powerful psychographic portrait of a person to whom well-tailored messages can be directed. Marcel Kosinski and colleagues explain the state of the science by 2013: “Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender” (Kosinski, Stillwell, & Graepel, 2013, p. 5802). Kosinski and colleagues’ conclusions are grounded in a massive sample “of over 58,000 volunteers who provided their Facebook Likes, detailed demographic profiles, and the results of several psychometric tests” (2013, p. 5802). After extracting out which “likes” cluster together and correlate with what traits from the psychometric tests, Kosinski and colleagues constructed models that can make accurate inferences about Facebook users. In turn, these inferences lend themselves to well-tailored, psychographics-informed messaging.

      In follow-up studies, the efficacy of Facebook data for tailored messaging has been empirically confirmed across very large populations using “ecologically-valid” (non-laboratory) methods. Kosinski and colleagues report that inferences from even a small number of Facebook likes powerfully heightens the impact of targeted messages on observable behaviors: “In three field experiments that reached over 3.5 million individuals with psychologically tailored advertising, we find that matching the content of persuasive appeals to individuals’ psychological characteristics significantly altered their behavior as measured by clicks and purchases” (Matz, Kosinski, Nave, & Stillwell, 2017, p. 12714). Facebook likes enable inferences into personality, for example, tendencies toward introversion/extraversion and open/closed postures toward new experience. Utilizing these inferences to tailor messages shows notable effects across large audiences: “Persuasive appeals that were matched to people’s extraversion or openness-to-experience level resulted in up to 40-percent more clicks and up to 50-percent more purchases” as compared with control groups (2017, p. 12714). Messages that are 40- or 50-percent more likely to elicit the messenger’s desired response can be said to have gone an appreciable distance toward prediction and control over audience response.

      Fast-forwarding to the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign, Alexander Nix (2016) of Cambridge Analytica discusses the use of psychographics in ←28 | 29→political advertising. In particular, the model that Nix endorses as powerful captures an audience member’s openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (acronymized as OCEAN). Informed by data-driven precision, a pro-gun ad can be designed on the assumption that distinctly different, psychographics-rooted motivations can stimulate a person’s support for guns. Pro-gun ads can thusly be designed for framing around safety (e.g., “your home invaded”)—or, alternatively, around tradition that appeals to arms passed “from father to son,” in a traditional androgenic lineage (Nix, 2016). In other words, psychographic approaches assay to take the pulse of motivations and the internal lives of specific audience members—and do so for instrumental purposes of blasting impactful messages directed at a particular person’s psychological makeup.

      In this environment that draws on detailed portraits of audience members, the producers of messages encounter far less guesswork and risk of having their messages ignored. Messages can be designed to more readily push a given person’s idiosyncratic buttons than the billboard by the highway that radiates the same message to all who pass it. Control model visions of “hypodermic needle” messaging injected directly into the audience may never be realized. Nevertheless, psychographics-informed messaging can plausibly take significant steps toward heightened prediction and control of audience reactions when applied on a mass scale.

      The implications for flak are straightforward as concerns crafting messages that will reach an audience member’s wheelhouse, wherever it may be. Moreover, flak memes more readily gain legs under them by making a debut before what could be called “a pre-existing hostile audience” that is inclined to seize on the negativism of flak toward a disfavored entity (Katherine Cross, quoted in Jeong, 2018, p. 25); it is also the type of like-minded audience that is also far easier to convene in a segmented media environment.

      Two phenomena of further interest to the study of flak gain impetus in the new millennium’s new media environment: directional motivation and illusory truth. As concerns the former, D.J. Flynn and colleague’s recent review of the literature suggests movement full circle back to Lazarsfeld: “Directionally motivated reasoning leads people to seek out information that reinforces their preferences (i.e., confirmation bias), counterargue information that contradicts their preferences (i.e., disconfirmation bias), and view proattitudinal information as more convincing than counterattitudinal information” (2017, p. 132). Flynn and colleagues are not optimistic about how, within an avalanche of messages, audiences ←29 | 30→resolve the tension between sorting out the truth and finding reinforcement: “Facts are always at least potentially vulnerable to directional motivated reasoning, especially when they are politicized by elites.” As a result, contemporary political conflict is not simply arguing over the narrower matters of “issues and public policy, but over reality itself” (emphasis added; Flynn, Nyhan, & Reifler, 2017, p. 144). When a concept of shared reality itself becomes increasingly contested, flak correspondingly thrives in the hot-house of ideologically-driven niches.

      The concept of illusory truth also furnishes impetus for making outlandish claims in service of flak to influence audiences. Gordon Pennycook and colleagues (2018) report a series of experiments in which subjects appraise demonstrated-to-be-false headlines as СКАЧАТЬ