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

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СКАЧАТЬ measurably endures for at least a week. Wholly implausible control condition statements get no such boost for familiarity (e.g., positing the Earth is square), while true statements still rate higher than false ones. Nonetheless, the study underlines the incentive to move the needle of opinion via repeated tendentious statements, since the feeling of familiarity in having “heard this one before” is readily conflated with plausibility.

      Indeed, the audience may not even be the flesh-and-blood audience anymore—at least not completely. The strategic use of bots and cyborg social media accounts can be managed to move the needle of opinion, in part, by circumventing the need to influence the minds of real persons. Molly K. McKew (2018) of the New Media Frontier details one such campaign in 2018. The campaign pushed Congressperson Devin Nunes’ so-called “intelligence memo” that flaked Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts to Trumpian specifications. Deliberate coordination and amplification of tweets by right-wing activists and Russian cyber-agents across 11 days pushed the “release the memo” topic into a trending one—and did so with a boost from “audience members” who were not anyone’s friends and neighbors, but tweet-amplifying-through-retweeting bots. A simulated audience performed for a real one to push the hashtag. Phenomena along these lines have become prevalent enough that it has a name—computational propaganda—and a unit at Oxford University dedicated to its study.

      In other words, the contemporary moment has realized the long-held dream of at least partly interrupting the monologues of the media oligopolies of the twentieth century. At the same time, new media platforms have, by the advent of the third decade of the millennium, exhibited characteristics ←30 | 31→(rigorous segmenting of the audience, deployment of surveillance and psychographics) that lend themselves to an intensifying flak regime.

      Having considered the audience, a necessary element to a flak campaign, I will now orient to basic dimensions of understanding flak; to begin, what is the scale of what I am defining as flak?

      Definition: What Is/Is Not Flak?

      In the previous chapter, I defined flak as tactics and strategies toward political harassment. To reiterate, flak is permeated with power, it is purposefully employed toward sociopolitical goals, and weaponized to disparage, delegitimize, and disable people and organizations. Below, I will endeavor to make the term less abstracted and ascribe more concrete characteristics to it. I will also delineate flak subtypes, in part through pertinent case studies. The stakes of this discussion are that flak often arises from the shadows to menace its targets with sadistic, bad faith scrutiny and delegitimization. In constructing a detailed account of flak, naming it and its sub-types, flak itself becomes the unwilling object of scrutiny—albeit, with demands for accuracy and dispassion that do not perturb flak discourses.

      Flak: How Big?

      There are situations that are too serious to merit description as flak; murder, for example. Flak-mongers seek to kill a reputation rather than a person, as cashiering someone’s good name is sufficient for flak purposes. Similarly, physical assault is beyond flak for its literal bare-knuckled quality.

      Flak should also not be construed as identity-based prejudice that is embedded in structural (often legalized, officially-sanctioned) forms of harassment to beat down subaltern populations. Examples of prejudice embedded in institutional practices include the terrors of Jim Crow in the United States. The more recent “hostile environment” program in the United Kingdom is also more than flak as it was the platform for undifferentiated harassment of immigrants in their regular encounters with the State (e.g., in the hospital, at school, with police officers in the streets). I posit that these chauvinistic practices are more serious than flak in their society-wide scale and diffusion into some of the everyday details of the victims’ lives. That said, systemic abuses surely have smaller flak episodes embedded within them—but are distinct from flak campaigns in being systemized by ←31 | 32→deeply inscribed custom and law in the first place. By contrast with diffuse systematic abuses, flak that is directed at and focused on a specific person or organization toward clear political objectives presents flak’s most evident and damaging form.

      Some phenomena are too big to be called flak while others are too limited in scope. Schoolyard bullying and malicious neighborhood gossip do not qualify, serious as they are within their own environments, for lacking wider impact. Similarly, episodes of trolling are traumatic and cause depthless pain for the victims. However grotesque and even criminal when it exceeds protected speech as credible death threats, trolling is not flak, as I am defining it. Trolling lacks a clear political dimension when wholly constituted by personal abuse; caveats to follow.

      Before I offer those caveats, consider the example of the South Korean “Dog Poop Girl” (hereafter, DPG). In 2005, DPG refused to clean the fecal matter that her dog deposited on a metro train floor, despite exhortations from others on the train. After observers recorded and disseminated the episode, DPG was the target of furious rebuke and eventually retreated from her university studies (Detel, 2013). Harassment of DPG was wildly out of proportion with her admittedly gross transgression—but it does not rise to the level of flak as there was no tangible sociopolitical goal implicated in the invective.

      By contrast, in 2013 in the United Kingdom, Caroline Criado Perez successfully campaigned for a woman to be featured on a British banknote. One may call this campaign feminist or female-friendly and it led to Jane Austen replacing Charles Darwin on the “tenner.” It also led to “50 tweets an hour being hurled toward her, including rape threats” (Jeong, 2018, p. 13). Sarah Jeong cites several more cases of women being abused online with a clearly gendered dimension that is, in effect, meant to harass all women. In the case of Zoë Quinn’s “Gamergate” ordeal, Jeong posits her former paramour Eron Gjoni as having “managed to crowdsource domestic abuse” (2018, p. 17). Moreover, Jeong observes that internet bots with female names are subject to “25 more times ‘malicious private messages” than male-named bots (2018, p. 20); chauvinism toward real people is, apparently, easy to project on to non-existent people.

      The upshot is that trolling of a person may be salted with sociopolitical issues that indicate a campaign to intimidate and harass broader social groups. Online furies may thereby cross an unmarked frontier into the domain of flak when the abuse is more than trolling a convenient target with personal antipathy. In these instances, flaksters bring on board a palpable sociopolitical ←32 | 33→dimension that is, nonetheless, far less structural and lacking in the formal authority of Jim Crow or the “hostile environment.” I will return to this point with further examples later in discussing issue-oriented as well as “ambient,” meta-ideological flak.

      Scandal—and Its Evil Twin

      What flak is and is not is at the heart of its relation to scandal.

      Published near the dawn of the Internet age, John B. Thompson’s Political Scandal parsimoniously identifies three temporal phases of his book’s titular subject (2000, p. 24). Thompson posits that scandal consists, first, of a transgression of consequence, coupled with an effort to hide the misbehavior. In the second phase, information leaks despite efforts to suppress it and hints of wrongdoing enter circulation. Third and finally, at an unmarked tipping point, the scandal becomes a full-blown story with the attendant disapprobation and further scrutiny.

      Thompson posits that, in recent centuries, scandals have become heavily mediated events. In this view, media narratives are not “secondary or incidental” but “partly constitutive” of scandal (2000, p. 61). As journalistic and/or State investigation into the scandal ramps up, the public can become absorbed in the drip-by-drip developments. As Thompson observes, the scandal narrative plays out like “a good novel” as audiences “assess the veracity of the protagonists, to figure out the plot and to predict its resolution” (2000, p. 73). After scandal has gone into motion, investigation commences with an opportunity to clean up the political sphere. In Thompson’s words, this is a public good since “scandals have highlighted hidden activities which were СКАЧАТЬ