Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media

by Samuel Woolley (Editor), Philip N. Howard (Editor)

Social media platforms do not just circulate political ideas, they support manipulative disinformation campaigns. While some of these disinformation campaigns are carried out directly by individuals, most are waged by software, commonly known as bots, programmed to perform simple, repetitive, robotic tasks. Some social media bots collect and distribute legitimate information, while others communicate with and harass people, manipulate trending algorithms, and inundate systems with spam. Campaigns made up of bots, fake accounts, and trolls can be coordinated by one person, or a small group of people, to give the illusion of large-scale consensus. Some political regimes use political bots to silence opponents and to push official state messaging, to sway the vote during elections, and to defame critics, human rights defenders, civil society groups, and journalists. This book argues that such automation and platform manipulation, amounts to a new political communications mechanism that Samuel Woolley and Philip N. Noward call "computational propaganda." This differs from older styles of propaganda in that it uses algorithms, automation, and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks while it actively learns from and mimicks real people so as to manipulate public opinion across a diverse range of platforms and device networks. This book includes cases of computational propaganda from nine countries (both democratic and authoritarian) and four continents (North and South America, Europe, and Asia), covering propaganda efforts over a wide array of social media platforms and usage in different types of political processes (elections, referenda, and during political crises).

Genres: Politics, Technology, Nonfiction, Sociology

271 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 11, 2018

About the author

Dr. Samuel Woolley is a writer, researcher and speaker who specializes in the study of disinformation, emergent technology and life online. He and his colleagues were among the first people to uncover the manipulative political use of social media during political events worldwide. They coined the terms “computational propaganda” and “political bot.”

Woolley’s next book, “The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth“, is set to be released in January 2020 by PublicAffairs/Hachette. His previous book, “Computational Propaganda,” (2018) is a series of country case studies on how digital tools were used during elections, national disasters and security crises in attempts manipulate public opinion. It is co-authored with Dr. Philip N. Howard and published by Oxford University Press. Woolley regularly writes publicly on politics and social media for venues including Wired, the Guardian, Motherboard, TechCrunch, Slate and the Atlantic. For his research, he has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and on NBC’s Today show, PBS’ Frontline and BBC’s News at Ten.

He has worked with numerous academic institutions (Oxford, Stanford, Berkeley), private companies (Alphabet, Deloitte, Allianz), governmental entities (US Senate, UK Parliament, NATO), and civil society groups (German Marshall Fund, Anti-Defamation League, National Endowment for Democracy) to translate the complex empirical impacts of computational propaganda to effects on everyday life. He has given talks and hosted workshops on digital manipulation—as it relates to subjects ranging from policy to vaccination to commerce—at venues including Princeton University, Data and Society, SXSW, BBC Monitoring, and Mishcon de Reya LLP.

Dr. Woolley is a current faculty member in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin’s Moody College of Communication. He has current and past academic affiliations with the Project on Democracy and the Internet at Stanford University, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley, and at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. He is the former Director of Research and Co-Founder of the National Science Foundation and European Research Council supported Computational Propaganda Project at the University of Oxford. He is the Founding Director of the Digital Intelligence Lab at the Institute for the Future, a 50-year-old think tank located in the heart of Silicon Valley. He has held research fellowships at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Anti-Defamation league, Google Jigsaw, the Tech Policy Lab at the University of Washington, and the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University. His research has been supported by large grants from the Hewlett Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, the New Venture Fund for Communications and the Ford Foundation. His research has informed policy in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries around the world. His PhD is from the University of Washington.

He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, Samantha, and their dog, Basket. He tweets from @samuelwoolley.

Reviews

[Wendelle]

This is a very important book, part of the publications of the Oxford Internet Institute. It tackles the occurrence of computational propaganda, defined as manipulative digital disinformation campaigns that use algorithms, automated products (bots) and human curators to drive misleading propaganda to the top of social network feeds for political purposes. They are used to "manufacture consensus" or to generate "the illusion of support for a political idea or policy" or politician. This book uses a variety of methods for its study, including interviews, statistical analysis of online posts, ethnography and participant observation, social network analysis, and surveys and public polling to deduce the extent of computational propaganda in 9 countries, including Russia, Ukraine, Canada, USA, Poland, Taiwan, Brazil, and Germany.

This is a very important issue as the World Economic Forum has declared that digital disinformation by insidious agents is one of the ten leading problems faced globally, and we are currently seeing those effects in the malaise of our politics. The book also identifies country-specific activities to combat the rise of bots, such as i) establishing fact-check websites, ii) establishing independent media and journalists, iii) app-blocking websites clearly coming from centers of disinformation campaigns such as Russia, iv)legislating against purchasing of fake 'likes' or bot support, v) legislating to hold bot makers accountable, such as in the case of libel, vi) proactive risk assessment studies, vii) treating bots for legal purposes as "smart agents, not mere tools, that have unique participation status in interaction"

[Foxtrot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Computational Propaganda is definitely a trendy topic gaining momentum among a broader audience. The authors seized the opportunity. But it leaves a feeling of unfinished work, a bit rushed.

The chapters are of very uneven qualities. For instance, the chapter about Germany doesn’t bring much to the table and is diluted to be virtually of an approximate equal length as the one on the US. The fact that most of the observations and conclusions for Germany are based in Twitter analysis is alarming because of the very low penetration of Twitter in Germany. That’s a bias in the analysis barely mentioned that put into doubt other part of the book if we want to consider an holistic approach to the social media climate.
On the other hand, the chapter about the US, focusing mainly on the 2016 elections, goes into a level of technicals details unmatched in any other chapters. This questions who is the target audience of such book. Indeed, if all other chapters are not that verbose of the technical details of the survey, the US chapter goes on to explain critical concepts of network analysis which are taught to Computer Science undergrads. Not sure this was appropriate in this book.

Overall it feels like this book lacks ambition. It sets high expectation at it’s premises but is truly a collection of unarticulated twitter analysis limited to very scopes topics (US election, Tibet in China, Russian inference in Poland). Sure the topics are appealing but the authors should have put those analysis in a bigger context, finding correlations and proposing new conclusions.

Also, an annoying point is the inconsistency in the terminology throughout the book. Having consistent terms to discuss what are bots, fake accounts, and automated account is paramount to make sure we all talk about the same thing. However, this expressions were inconsistently defined throughout each chapter, making it harder to follow. This is likely due to a book with multiple authors but they should have harmonized their terminology.

Overall, Computational Propaganda promises a lot but delivers a little. It is an “ok book” if you never read about the subject, surely giving some keys of understanding the potential impact of computational propaganda. But it doesn’t go beyond a series of uncorrelated analysis of particular situations. If you are already a little knowledgeable in the topic, I wouldn’t recommend this book.

[Zaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

a good look at the topic, the information ecosystem has changed with the profileration of social media. It's hardly controversial to suggest that the media plays a role in the propogation of belief and opinion, so it shouldn't be controversial to believe that a new information environment change how beliefs and opinions are propogated, anaylizing and contextualizing the new information ecosystem should be important to everyone interested in how the world works.

[Jill Mulloy · Rating 5 out of 5]

SO GOOD!!!!!

[Kat Pitré · Rating 5 out of 5]

While some of the studies are a bit out of date (but no less informative or insightful), overall this book is a great birds-eye-view of the digital propaganda landscape, which is a must-read for any person who exists on the internet (ie, everyone!). Media literacy is so important, and this book reaffirms that a thousand times over.

[Printed Pages and Coffee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really great overview of computational propaganda and the ways that it is being used globally, as well as the effects that it has had and may have in future. Well worth a read.