Disinformation and Data Lockdown on Social Platforms

Shawn Walker, Dan Mercea, Marco Bastos, Shawn Walker, Dan Mercea, Marco Bastos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000533095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Étude des média

This book addresses the question of how researchers can conduct independent, ethical research on mal-, mis- and disinformation in a rapidly changing and hostile data environment.

The escalating issue of data access is thrown into sharp relief by the large-scale use of bots, trolls, fake news, and strategies of false amplification, the effects of which are difficult to quantify due to a corporate environment favouring platform lockdowns and the restriction of access to Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). As social media platforms increase obstacles to independent scholarship by dramatically curbing access to APIs, researchers are faced with the stark choice of either limiting their use of trace data or developing new methods of data collection. Without a breakthrough, social media research may go the way of search engine research, in which only a small group of researchers who have direct relationships with search companies such as Google and Microsoft can access data and conduct research.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue ofthe journal, Information, Communication & Society.

Introduction The disinformation landscape and the lockdown of social platforms

Shawn Walker

, Dan Mercea

and Marco Bastos

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the special issue considers how independent research on mis/disinformation campaigns can be conducted in a corporate environment hostile to academic research. We provide an overview of the disinformation landscape in the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal and social platforms’ decision to enforce access lockdowns and the throttling of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for data collection. We argue that the governance shift from user communities to social media algorithms, along with social platforms’ intensive emphasis on generating revenue from user data, has eroded the mutual trust of networked publics and opened the way for dis/misinformation campaigns. We discuss the importance of open, public APIs for academic research as well as the unique challenges of collecting social media data to study highly ephemeral mis/disinformation campaigns. The introduction concludes with an assessment of the growing data access gap that not only hinders research of public interest, but that may also preclude researchers from identifying meaningful research questions as activity on social platforms becomes increasingly more inscrutable and unobservable.

Introduction

This Special Issue addresses the question of how researchers can conduct independent, ethical research on dis/misinformation operations in a rapidly changing and hostile data environment. The escalating issue of data access we discuss is thrown into sharp relief by the strategic use of bots, trolls, fake news, strategies of false amplification, and a corporate environment favoring platform lockdowns and the restriction of access to Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). As social media platforms increase obstacles to independent scholarship by dramatically curbing access to APIs, researchers are faced with the stark choice of either limiting their use of trace data or developing new methods of data collection. Without a breakthrough, social media research may go the way of search engine research, in which only a small group of researchers who have direct relationships with search companies such as Google and Microsoft can access data and conduct research.

The reflections that follow highlight the current scholarly predicament of grappling with the time-sensitive nature of strategic and disruptive communication in highly ephemeral dis/misinformation campaigns. These campaigns unfold in increasingly polarized, hybrid media environments where news stories are written, disseminated, and interpreted within and across intricate digital networks. While researchers are developing more sophisticated multi-method research designs and rich multi-source data sets (Chadwick, Vaccari, & O’Loughlin, 2018; Möller, Trilling, Helberger, & van Es, 2018), this methodological progress is threatened by the active resistance of social media platforms to providing support for research on topics that require greater transparency and may negatively impact their bottom line (Dance, LaForgia, & Confessore, 2018).

The disinformation landscape

The set of articles presented in this issue take stock of the epochal changes triggered by the deployment of data-driven micro-targeting in political campaigns epitomized by the Cambridge Analytica data scandal and the ensuing data lockdown enforced by social media platforms. Digital trace data has been increasingly linked to disinformation, misinformation, and state propaganda across Western industrialized democracies and countries in the Global South, where state and non-state actors seek to strategically diffuse content that heightens partisanship and erodes the general trust in democratic institutions.

Influence operations weaponizing social media have been identified in elections worldwide, with prominent examples including the 2016 US elections and the 2017 general elections in France (Bessi & Ferrara, 2016; Ferrara, 2017; Weedon, Nuland, & Stamos, 2017). This evolving disinformation landscape required the increasing adoption of specialized vocabulary associated with influence and disruptive operations to describe a set of media practices designed to exploit deep-seated tensions in liberal democracies (Bennett & Steven, 2018). The tactics documented are part of a concerted strategy to polarize voters and alienate them from the electoral process (Benkler, Faris, & Roberts, 2018). This scheme – infamously associated with Russian troll factories – took the form of misinformation, or information identified as inaccurate (Karlova & Fisher, 2013), and disinformation, or the intentional distribution of fabricated stories to advance political goals (Bennett & Steven, 2018).

Misinformation and disinformation pose a serious threat to objective decision-making by the voting public (Lewandowsky, Ecker, & Cook, 2017, p. 354). The effectiveness of dis/misinformation campaigns has in part (Benkler et al., 2018) been attributed to the manner in which they have been able to take advantage of the biases (Comor, 2001; Innis, 1982) intrinsic to social media platforms, particularly the attention economy and the social media supply chain that relies on viral content (Jenkins, Ford, Green, & New, 2013) for revenue generation. In their response, social media platforms attempted to rekindle trust by appearing to reinforce individual privacy within a newly secured user community, a set of measures that also locked academic and non-profit researchers out from studying social platforms while preserving corporate and business access to social media users’ data.

Infrastructural transformation of the networked publics

This backdrop of influence operations and information warfare presents a considerable departure from years of euphoric rhetoric praising the democratization of public discourse brought by networking technology and social media platforms (Howard & Hussain, 2013). Early scholarship extolling the potential of social media for democratization and deliberation inadvertently reinforced a narrative championing communication and collaboration as expected affordances of social platforms (Loader & Mercea, 2011). By the end of the decade, however, the narrative surrounding social platforms increasingly turned to metaphors foregrounding polarization and division in a landscape marked by tribalism and information warfare (Benkler et al., 2018), enabled by a business model driven above all by the commodification of digital circulation and its capitalization on financial markets (Langley & Leyshon, 2017).

Scholarship on this hybrid media ecosystem (Chadwick, 2017) explored the technological affordances and ideological leanings that shape social media interaction, with a topical interest in the potential for civic engagement and democratic revitalization (Zuckerman, 2014). Bennett and Segerberg (2013) expanded on Olson’s seminal work on the logic of collective action to explain the rise of digital networked politics where individuals would come together to address common problems. Similarly, Castells (2009) described a global media ecology of self-publication and scalable mobilization that advanced internet use and political participation (Castells, 2012).

Open platforms and unrestricted access offered the cornerstone of networked publics that reconfigured sociality and public life (boyd, 2008). The relatively open infrastructure of networked publics was also explored in scholarship detailing how online social networks support gatewatching (Bruns, 2005) and practices in citizen journalism that are central to a diverse media ecosystem (Hermida, 2010), with citizens auditing the gatekeeping power of mainstream media and holding elite interests to account (Tufekci & Wilson, 2012). By most assessments, social network sites were welcoming challengers to the monopoly enjoyed by the mass media (Castells, 2012), with only limited attention devoted to the opportunities offered to propagandists that could similarly coordinate and organize disinformation campaigns through decentralized and distributed networks (Benkler et al., 2018).

These developments challenged the very idea of networked publics and Castells’ (2012) depiction of the internet as universal commons. However, the transition from narratives emphasizing open communication to concerns about information warfare was neither immediate nor trivial. With mobile platforms slowly replacing desktop-based applications, open standards gave way to centralized communication systems epitomized by social media platforms and social technologies pivoted from a business model centered on software and services to the selling and reselling of user data. These changes endangered the openness of networked publics, with the debate underpinning networks in the late 90s being replaced by a focus on the affordances of mobile apps and social platforms, whose user base largely differs from living communities of users that would come together around common interests.

Also noticeable in the transition from networked publics to social platforms was the increased commercialization of previously public, open, and often collaborative spaces that were increasingly reduced to private property. This infrastructural transformation of the networked publics continues to drive anxieties about social media platforms in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, including topical issues of digital privacy, data access, surveillance, microtargeting, and the growing influence of algorithms in society. Counterbalancing reactions to these developments, distributed networks services have started in the Fediverse such as Mastodon or Pleroma. However, on the most prevalent social media platforms, the existing networked publics are defined by the technological and market exigencies of th...