Solving Social Media’s Propaganda Problem
How two sociologists foresaw social media’s current troubles seventy years ago — and what they can teach us about how to fix them
Two weeks ago, Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey issued a mea culpa. In thirteen tweets, Dorsey acknowledged the site’s role in enabling the misinformation, trolling, and harassment endemic on Twitter and other social media platforms. Dorsey pledged Twitter would do better, committing to “help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation.” In admitting Twitter hadn’t been a tool for unalloyed public good, Dorsey confirmed visions of the World Wide Web as techno-utopian space of free expression were inadequate: “we didn’t,” he tweeted, “fully predict or understand the real-world negative consequences.”
Like his fellow social media mogul Mark Zuckerberg, Dorsey seems to have been taken by surprise by the many ways in which his dream of “instant, public, global messaging and conversation” has soured — by the data theft, the trolling, the harassment, the proliferation of fake news, conspiracy theories, and Russian bots. But Dorsey and Zuckerberg shouldn’t have been surprised — none of us, especially those of us who study media and communication for a living, should have been.
As alarm at the influence of social media over political polarization, hate speech, misinformation, and the rising tide of nativist xenophobia has grown over the past year, I’ve found myself thinking over and over about an article published seventy years ago, a warhorse of the communications literature I taught to distracted first-year undergraduates almost a decade ago as a teaching assistant. That article is Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton’s 1948 classic “Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action.” I guess neither my students nor I were paying enough attention at the time, because Lazarsfeld and Merton describe with uncanny prescience the conditions under which mediated propaganda would succeed in the United States — conditions Facebook, Twitter, Google and other platforms have created in our contemporary social media age.
Lazarsfeld and Merton were lifelong friends, but an academic odd couple. Merton, who later became one of the most famous American sociologists of 20th century, was a meditative theorist, while Lazarsfeld was an enthusiastic quantitative researcher and institutional fixer. Yet at Columbia University in the late 1940s, both men were concerned about the impact of the burgeoning mass media of their post-WWII day: popular magazines, newspapers, radio, and film, with television just about to appear on the horizon. While a speed read of the piece might suggest Lazarsfeld and Merton thought there wasn’t much to worry about in terms of mass media’s propagandizing effects, “Mass Communication” actually reads as an eerie warning against exactly the kind of technical, commercial, and social dominance now claimed by Facebook and its ilk (just try reading the original mentally replacing “mass media” with “social media” and you’ll see what I mean).
Lazarsfeld and Merton observed the commercial ownership of American mass media in the late 1940s meant that most outlets were predisposed to support the social status quo and not rock the boat — a familiar sentiment today in an age of “both sides do it” journalism. What Lazarsfeld and Merton — especially Merton — were really concerned with was how such a media system could be successful in propagandizing a mass audience. The two thus identified three conditions, under one or more of which “propaganda for social objectives” might be successful: monopolization, canalization of a viewer’s values, and supplementation, or face-to-face contact.
What did Lazarsfeld and Merton mean by these three criteria? Under monopolization, they wrote, “there is little or no opposition in the mass media to the diffusion of values, policies or public images…[and] occurs in the absence of counterpropaganda.” One set of messages, uncontested, could swamp public opinion. With canalization, the authors argued, “once [a] gross pattern of behavior or a generic attitude has been established, it can be canalized in one direction or another.” In other words, channeling existing social values and beliefs towards particular ends would be easier that totally changing those values and beliefs. Finally, Lazarsfeld and Merton pointed out that supplementation through face-to-face contacts made mediated propaganda vastly more effective. They cited the success of the notorious 1930s nativist preacher Father Charles Coughlin, whose success was due in part to followers of his radio show listening together in small groups and talking to each other about its content, mutually reinforcing Coughlin’s fascistic, anti-Semitic message. If just one of these three conditions were met, Lazarsfeld and Merton warned, mass propaganda could be effective in the United States.
Today, all three of “Mass Communication”’s criteria for effective propaganda are at work via social media platforms. First Facebook and Google in particular command an enormous, almost monopolistic share of both user eyeballs and online advertising revenue. Second: both commercial advertisers and political campaigns operating on these platforms are expert at harnessing emotion to channel already existing values and opinions — often ugly ones — towards buying and voting habits. Third, social media thrives in principal on supplementation, both offline and online. Facebook’s focus on showing its users content posted by close friends and family is as powerful as the face-to-face work of activist groups and political campaigns, and small group discussions online between like-minded people characterize forums like 4Chan and Reddit known for producing rabid online actors.
One of the few things “Mass Communication” gets wrong (apart from some ill-advised harrumphing about soap operas) is its declaration that none of their three conditions were likely to ever be met. Lazarsfeld and Merton believed the conformist nature of the American media, the middle-of-the road nature of American political discourse, and the expense of organizing all those face-to-face meetings meant social change through mass media effects was extraordinarily difficult. One of the great ironies of this story is that the kinds of social persuasion Lazarsfeld and Merton were thinking about in “Mass Communication” were two-fold: the propaganda of the just-defeated Nazis, yes, but also the socially progressive messages of the New Deal. Lazarsfeld and Merton presented their three conditions as evidence for how difficult it would be to change the views of Americans beset by “deep-seated ethnic and racial prejudice,” and how challenging it would be for progressive messages to burst the bubble of corporate news. What Lazarsfeld and Merton couldn’t have predicted in the immediate post-war moment was a media ecosystem where deep-seated prejudices of every kind would be disseminated and reinforced by social media platform monopolies, and where elite media consensus would cede the field to the most regressive political views in American society.
What can these insights from a different era tell us about today’s social media mess, and how to potentially fix it? First, they’re a testament to the relevance, and importance, of communications and media studies, and their history, to contemporary debates about social media regulation, and on the broader question of digital technologies’ social impact. Second, it’s that Lazarsfeld and Merton’s conditions for propagandizing towards social change potentially work as well for progressives as they do for conservatives. Merton and Lazarsfeld argued that media monopolies could be neutralized by an equal amount of counter-messaging, an insight that would seem to argue for more social media activity by progressive causes, not less. Small-group organizing online and off, and making the connection between deep-seated values and progressive causes, are meanwhile staples of the Black Lives Matters movement, the anti-Trump Resistance, and the nascent groundswell for gun control.
But much rests with Jack Dorsey and the rest of Silicon Valley’s social media giants: unless they act to commit their platforms to the progressive values they often espouse in public, propaganda from the reactionary status quo — what Brian Keegan calls “turpitude-as-a-service” — isn’t going away. Vague, technocratic calls to better measure the “health” of a platform, as espoused by Twitter this past weekend, aren’t going to cut it: the company already measures plenty, and hasn’t been willing to stop the abuse and misinformation on the site. A better solution (which Twitter has also seemingly begun to embrace) implicitly advocated by Lazarsfeld and Merton seventy years ago: hire more social scientists and humanists. “Unless we locate these patterns in historical and sociological terms,” they cautioned, “we may find ourselves confusedly engaged in condemning without understanding.” So, pick up the phone, Zuck or Jack: we’re waiting for your call.
