For a quick reality check - do yourself a favour and watch Carole Cadwalladr’s 15 minute TED talk about cyber-meddling in the Brexit and Trump campaigns. Before I viewed this I didn’t appreciate how it was done, but following Carole’s explanation it all starts to make sense. At first it seems like a hoax conspiracy theory, but the more you think about it in relation to your own experiences, the more it begins to ring true that social media is subversively influencing the minds and mood of electorates. We have tended to think of internet search engines like digital encyclopaedias, and social media apps as connectors, but when we understand how they feed different information to users according to their preferences and inclinations, we realise they can also be divisive.
I’m now wondering if this is the invisible cause of the swing towards the Liberal-National Party (LNP) in yesterday’s federal election? It’s important to acknowledge the influence of obvious factors like the editorial control of traditional news media by News Corp, and the LNP/UAP preference deal, but these dark unseen forces at play through news and advertising in social media, seem to be real, significant and compounding.
The Australian Labor Party shouldn’t beat themselves up over this election defeat. It surprised the political analysts. Until the results started to roll in, they appeared to be suggesting that Labor’s campaign was stronger. Bill Shorten, with a united, experienced and talented team, presented a substantial change agenda with progressive policies. By comparison the LNP campaign ran on a vacuum of new policy, and promises of stable government, despite a track record of mutinies and an exodus of senior members.
All of this is troubling for anyone who cares about the future and fairness of elections at any level of government. A knee-jerk response might be to outlaw sponsored political ads on social media but how do you trace or circumvent the algorithm spinners who, for hidden fees, covertly control the information we are fed. They have ways and means to sneak around and ahead of our consciousness.
And, I am particularly perplexed because this is pertinent to my thesis which is about the role and power of urban narrative on the identity and shape of cities. I have been gathering and distiling prevailing narratives in news media to show how they influence development and the image of the Gold Coast. Adopting anthropologist, Clifford Geertz’s definition of culture as “the ensemble of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves”, I made an early assumption that to grow an authentic civic culture, citizens should simply start telling more stories about the place and their connections to it. Eventually, as the narrative evolves, the true identity of the city will become the stories they keep repeating. But here is a clear demonstration why it’s not quite that simple because it is vulnerable to manipulation.
Urban activist, Jane Jacobs
In ‘Dark Age Ahead’ (2004), urban activist Jane Jacobs wrote about possibilities brought by digital technology and media for better understanding the image of cities. She identified the increasing significance of information and communication technology as a force majeure in the construction and projection of urban narratives and the image of cities. She saw opportunities as infinite and exciting, but also unwieldy and prone to homogeneity, superficiality, and even corruption. This was a decade before the emergence and spread of algorithmic culture. Only now are we beginning to recognise this phenomenon of algorithmic culture “spreading lies in darkness with illegal cash” and disrupting centuries of electoral laws and principles.
For my research, this has implications that I can’t ignore and will need to re-think. I’m also worried about what this means for our next local government election in March 2020. Are the dark forces supporting corporate and commercial interests over community and cultural interests, already at play?
This certainly seems like a real and wicked problem. If anyone has solutions, I’d be very grateful if you’d let me know because these complications are not something that I ever really wanted to have to think about…
P.S. It was reassuring this became a topic for discussion on #qanda post-election on 20 May 2019, especially the words of Ming Long, Chair of AMP Capital Funds Management calling for the government to stop misleading and deceptive advertising in political campaigns.