[OPLIN 4cast] OPLIN 4Cast #555: The success of online outrage

Wed Aug 16 10:30:15 EDT 2017

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OPLIN 4Cast #555: The success of online outrage
August 16th, 2017

[image: OUTRAGE carved in stone] Before last weekend gave a whole new
meaning to “Charlottesville” and before GoDaddy and Google and several
other web hosting companies refused to host
<https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/15/after-charlottesville-more-web-service-providers-ditch-the-daily-stormer-for-tos-violations/>
a Neo-Nazi website, BuzzFeed News published a study in early August about
partisan websites and Facebook pages (first link below) revealing the money
motive behind many of the sites. Aside from financial gain, we already knew
that stirring up anger on the internet is an effective way to influence
public opinion. But why does online outrage – real or not – work so well?
Is there some fatal flaw in the internet that lends itself to such
partisanship? As one of the early creators of the internet said (quoted in
the Pew Research Center article linked below), “We didn’t focus on how you
could wreck this system intentionally.”

   -
   - Inside the partisan fight for your news feed
   <https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/inside-the-partisan-fight-for-your-news-feed>
   (BuzzFeed | Craig Silverman, Jane Lytvynenko, Lam Thuy Vo and Jeremy
   Singer-Vine)  “The interviews and data reveal a large, often interconnected
   world where Facebook plays kingmaker as much as it crushes dreams, where
   anger and stoking partisan hatred are core strategies on the right and
   left, and where the biggest players are working to secure dominance by
   partnering with, or acquiring, competitors and launching new sites to flood
   the market so new players can’t gain a foothold.”
   - The fate of online trust in the next decade
   <http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/08/10/the-fate-of-online-trust-in-the-next-decade/>
   (Pew Research Center | Lee Rainie and Janna Anderson)  “Trust has not been
   having a good run in recent years, and there is considerable concern that
   people’s uses of the internet are a major contributor to the problem. […]
   Moreover, the rise of the internet and social media has enabled entirely
   new kinds of relationships and communities in which trust must be
   negotiated with others whom users do not see, with faraway enterprises,
   under circumstances that are not wholly familiar, in a world exploding with
   information of uncertain provenance used by actors employing
   ever-proliferating strategies to capture users’ attention.”
   - Fake news and partisan epistemology
   <https://kiej.georgetown.edu/fake-news-partisan-epistemology/> (Kennedy
   Institute of Ethics | Regina Rini)  “[…] people believe fake news because
   they acquire it through social media sharing, which is a peculiar sort of
   testimony. Social media sharing has features that reduce audience
   willingness to think critically or check facts. This effect is amplified
   when the testifier and audience share a partisan orientation. Shared
   partisan affiliation encourages testimony recipients to grant more
   credibility to testifiers than would otherwise be warranted.”
   - Study: Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media
   agenda
   <https://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php>
   (Columbia Journalism Review | Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts,
   and Ethan Zuckerman)  “Rather than ‘fake news’ in the sense of wholly
   fabricated falsities, many of the most-shared stories can more accurately
   be understood as disinformation: the purposeful construction of true or
   partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core,
   misleading. Over the course of the election, this turned the right-wing
   media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge
   community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them
   from journalism that challenged it.”

*Articles from Ohio Web Library <http://ohioweblibrary.org>:*

   - Polarization as a function of citizen predispositions and exposure to
   news on the internet.
   <http://proxy.oplin.org:2054/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=108866863>
   (*Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media*, Sept. 2015, p.381-398 |
   David Tewksbury and Julius Matthew Riles)
   - Party polarization, media choice, and mass partisan-ideological
   sorting.
   <http://proxy.oplin.org:2054/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=114678729>
   (*Public Opinion Quarterly*, 2016 Supplement, p. 272-297 | Nicholas T.
   Davis and Johanna L. Dunaway)
   - Fake news expert on how false stories spread and why people believe
   them.
   <http://proxy.oplin.org:2054/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nfh&AN=6XN201612141201>
   (*Fresh Air* (NPR), 12/14/2016 | Dave Davies)

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