The Golden Age of Propaganda Is Here Again
We’re just now getting the news of an overwhelming Conservative victory in the UK elections, the first real electoral test of the free-for-all that ensues when the largest communications distributor in world history decides to sell advertising to politicians willing to tell deliberate lies.
Facebook’s already accused in one genocide — what will it take for the world to wake up?
I recently began running fake ads on Facebook and alerting the media to the dangers of paid manipulation spread through microtargeted advertising on a platform where 2.5 billion of the world’s 4.5 billion internet users log on monthly.
When Facebook suppressed my first fake ad — an environmental tribute to U.S. conservatives that ended with a doctored clip showing Senator Lindsey Graham endorsing the Green New Deal — I filed for office to continue exposing Facebook’s dangerous business practices.
Facebook first said it would stop me, then didn’t even bother — keeping its right-wing clients happy means hands off the politicians, even those agitating against it. And Facebook continues to grow, up 45% on the year even after today’s dip on antitrust concerns.
Facebook funds third-party fact checking. But even participants in the program say it’s bunk. That’s because politicians themselves are exempt from fact checking on the Facebook platform.
While a scammer or over-exuberant activist might see their page flagged for fake news — and even penalized with reduced organic reach — if a misleading or deceitful posts goes viral, politicians can lie on Facebook with abandon. And advertise those lies, too. Due to the nonstop flood of content across the platform, most posts and ads aren’t fact checked. Politicians, not at all.
Grandstanding liars like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson never had it so good. Showboating is it. Propaganda is back like the Golden Age never left.
In the days leading up to Thursdays vote in the UK, fact checkers found the Conservatives dropping thousands of microtargeted ads with scores of false themes. While the liberal Labour Party used more broadly targeted ads, the Conservatives fielded their lies in the narrowly targeted, high volume ads preferred by the Trump campaign.
“The Golden Age of Propoganda” describes the use of media by rising authoritarian regimes in the 1930s and the scrambling U.S. response in the 1940s. Satirist Sacha Baron Cohen has compared Facebook’s role on the internet today to that of Nazi-era propagandists, suggesting that CEO Mark Zuckerberg would have sold ads to Hitler on his “solution to the Jewish problem.”
In October, The Washington Post reported that President Trump had made “13,435 false or misleading claims” in his first 1,000 days in office. Trump is not only a liar, he is a racist and misogynist whose lifelong history of discrimination is well documented. Facebook was a linchpin of his 2016 electoral victory, during and after which his campaign digital strategists explained their voter suppression efforts and attributed the win to Facebook.
We’ve seen the horrors that can ensue when the ruling, authoritarian party co-opts the media. World War II is long behind us, but so are its bitter lessons. Racist politicians and their eager propagandists are once again twisting our societies with hate. The Golden Age of Propaganda is here again.
