How fake news spreads — a defence of clicktivism
All have a role to play in promoting a message, from the demagogue public speaker, stirring up crowds and spewing out soundbites, through to the supporter-in-spirit, who agrees with the message but, for whatever reasons, is not actively involved beyond liking and sharing on social media.
The alt-right are not just extremists, they are also well organised clicktivists — only they’re tapping into the power of the click like no others, analysing interaction, setting up their own versions of Reddit to test and learn, and even using Reddit itself to spread fake news.
This is clicktivism as market research, and clicktivism as free advertising. If liberalism is to successfully fight back, liberals need to start using similar marketing techniques.
How organised clicktivism promotes fake news
Here’s a good case study via the New York Times — how a fake news story went viral during the US election cycle:
Day 1: Angry Trump supporter posts a photo he claims is proof of something it’s not proof of
Day 2: This gets picked up by an alt-right-dominated pro-Trump part of Reddit, and upvoted to the top
Day 3: Sympathetic and/or unscrupulous media (that should know better, but is ideologically-driven and needs pageviews to make money, and doesn’t care if those are driven by lies and whipped-up outrage) picks up the story. Less scrupulous, more explicitly extreme blogs add more conspiracies on top. It makes TV news. Trump tweets about the conspiracy.
Day 4: Denials are issued, including a retraction by the original source of the image, who’s by now realised he was wrong. No one cares. The story has snowballed
Day 2 is the crucial time. Getting that story noticed was thanks to it going viral on Reddit — still a significant source of story ideas for lazy Millennial journalists. How did it go viral? Only a few thousand clicks.
Making the armchair activist actively effective
Now, at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist myself, one thing the alt-right has been very good at is organising targeted swarms of online armchair activists. It’s a technique borrowed from state social media propaganda machines — these days most notably Russia, which mobilised real and fake accounts in their droves to post pro-Kremlin comments on Western media and on social in the run up to and during the invasion of Crimea.
I don’t even believe these are mostly bots (though some doubtless are). When UKIPper-in-a-not-very-convincing-Tory-disguise Dan Hannan set his digital attack dogs on me during the EU Referendum campaign, my mentions were toast for a good couple of days — and I’m fairly sure every single person hurling abuse at me was a real person, many of them with genuine outrage.
All it takes is two or three people with active, passionate followings to mobilise large numbers of angry online activists, and any kind of vote-based system, like Reddit, can be near instantly gamed. You don’t even need to run a script, or set up bots. Humans work just as well — and lend a veneer of plausible deniability, which is at the heart of the alt-right strategy (Aside: this emphasis on digital and plausible deniability is what distinguishes them, in my mind, from traditional neo-Nazi operations, which is part of the reason I’ll continue to use the term alt-right).
It’s a very effective technique. With even a relatively small base of committed followers with time on their hands, getting a couple of thousand people to vote twice each under two different accounts can be enough to surface a story and attract media attention.
At the same time, it expands the scope of the extremist / conspiracy-theorist echo-chamber. “If thousands of people like this story, there must be something in it” is enough for some lazy journalists to just copy-paste without fact checking. Angry comments beneath the story fuel the fire of anger in sympathetic followers. Angry comments below news stories about the fake story in the mainstream media and on blogs fan the flames of rage.
People see that other people are angry, and they start to get angry themselves. And before you know it, the initial lie/mistake has a life of its own, being retweeted, shared, and distorted further and further with every new wave as further conspiracies are tapped on.
The more people who are exposed to the lie, the more people will be won over — gradually — to the side of the conspiracy theory, because winning people over is a war of attrition. The more exposure there is to an idea, the more receptive people will be to it.
It all starts with clicktivism.
What the alt-right has done, borrowing from Russia and others, is to organise its clicktivism to maximise its impact. This is how they began to win the propaganda war. To fight back, the centre and left need to do the same.
