[SPEAKER_00]: our press secretary gave all turn to the facts to that. [SPEAKER_00]: My goal in this definition was to be crucial, but not particularly helpful. [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to Unspon, the podcast that makes you better at finding the truth. [SPEAKER_01]: The way people get news is changing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It used to be that there were many reporters who would research stories and write articles, but now politicians and famous people share information directly with you on social media and the internet. [SPEAKER_01]: That means you find out things fast, but it's up to you to make sure the information's actually accurate. [SPEAKER_01]: And newsmakers don't always do their part. [SPEAKER_01]: The temptation to manipulate information is strong.
[SPEAKER_01]: They bend the truth to deceive so that they can avoid accountability so that they can advance their agendas. [SPEAKER_01]: When you recognize these agendas, you can sometimes find out what's real. [SPEAKER_01]: And we're at a crossroads where anyone can share anything online, so it's important to sharpen your critical thinking skills. [SPEAKER_01]: Finding that deception before it goes viral is pretty much a survival skill now, and we're going to do it together.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's get on the spun. [SPEAKER_01]: Hello to you, Seekers, and welcome to this week's episode of Unspun. [SPEAKER_01]: If you were paying attention to social media in twenty- seventeen, you might remember the MeToo movement. [SPEAKER_01]: It actually originated with an activist named Toronto Burke in two thousand and six, but it became newly popular in twenty- seventeen, when actress Alyssa Milano made it a trending Twitter hashtag.
[SPEAKER_01]: She encouraged victims of sexual harassment and assault to describe their experiences. [SPEAKER_01]: So in a sense, Milano borrowed that idea and brought out some truly harrowing stories from social media users who joined the trend. [SPEAKER_01]: But did you know that the MeToo idea was used to promote Islamophobia in Germany? [SPEAKER_01]: On this week's episode, we're going to talk about agenda surfing.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is where our newsmaker will latch on to something being talked about in pop culture, either as a way of attracting attention to themselves or a way of distracting from other problems that there haven't. [SPEAKER_01]: Sound interesting? [SPEAKER_01]: Well, then let's get on spun. [SPEAKER_01]: Imagine a sound so loud, so intense, that it can damage your hearing in minutes. [SPEAKER_01]: That's the power of a hundred and twenty decibels.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a critical threshold, and you can hear it in sounds like fireworks, concerts, sirens, some power tools. [SPEAKER_01]: But what does that have to do with sexual harassment? [SPEAKER_01]: In early twenty eighteen, the identitarian movement in Austria and Germany, it was a far-right group, sought to amplify their message that they thought immigration and in particular Muslim immigration was harmful for Europe.
[SPEAKER_01]: They saw an opportunity in the growing me-to movement, so they launched their own campaign that they called a hundred and twenty decibels, speaking about a pocket alarm that emits a hundred and twenty decibels sound that a woman might use on the street to keep from being attacked. [SPEAKER_01]: The goal was to focus on a few cases where immigrants were accused of sexual assault, adding in that popular hashtag to make it seem like the two were related.
[SPEAKER_01]: Basically, they were hijacking the Me Too Conversation to push the xenophobic agenda. [SPEAKER_01]: And according to Deutschewella, which is a German news source, the adenitarian movement is a youth organization that are kind of the, quote, hipsters of the far right into the, quote, in the country. [SPEAKER_01]: They're very anti-immigration, and they saw the ways of immigrants to the country from primarily Muslim countries as a threat to German culture and safety.
[SPEAKER_01]: But instead of being the jackbooted skinheads who might be dismissed as radical, they're more the trimbeards and hipster glasses kind. [SPEAKER_01]: But taking over that MeToo idea, you know, viral social media trend was a way to blame immigrants for sex crimes and to use that popular idea for their own purposes. [SPEAKER_01]: It's an example of a gender surfing.
[SPEAKER_01]: A gender surfing is something researchers call discursive hijacking, where you take the definition of a problem and you reshape it to meet your own political goals. [SPEAKER_01]: It's surprisingly common. [SPEAKER_01]: In the case of the hundred and twenty decibel movement, they were trying to use that do it yourself, social media, aesthetic to make it seem like their me two type posts were organic, you know, coming from the crowd.
[SPEAKER_01]: They also made a video called Women Fight Back that featured a series of young women speaking into the camera saying things like, we are not secure because you are not securing us and because you refuse to control who is coming in and because you refuse to deport criminals. [SPEAKER_01]: The video goes on to say we're facing a majority of young men that come from archaic societies with no women's rights.
[SPEAKER_01]: As the music swells in the background, speaker after speaker says, quote, we are the daughters of Europa. [SPEAKER_01]: So by taking that me to hashtag, they're making it seem like the thing that they are saying is something that is the same as what other people are talking about online, right? [SPEAKER_01]: They're trying to kind of take over that credibility. [SPEAKER_01]: And it's not just political movements.
[SPEAKER_01]: Individual politicians and other newsmakers even brands will hop on to trending topics to get public attention. [SPEAKER_01]: These are a bunch of strategies including emotional messaging to pull at those heartstrings and sometimes they will ask supporters to flood particular hashtags so that they can take over these online conversations. [SPEAKER_01]: But what's really interesting to me is how sophisticated these kinds of campaigns have become.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to go through a whole bunch of research that I found on this topic. [SPEAKER_01]: Back in the early days of Twitter, in the twenty-tenths, politicians and newsmakers were really starting to figure out how to use social media platforms like Twitter, and like Facebook, to grab attention and connect with voters. [SPEAKER_01]: But they were doing it in pretty different ways based on which platform they were using.
[SPEAKER_01]: So researchers actually studied elections in Italy, Norway, Australia, and Germany that year. [SPEAKER_01]: Politicians were treating Facebook and Twitter completely differently at the time because of how those platforms actually worked. [SPEAKER_01]: On Facebook, they would make these central hubs where supporters could like their pages and then politicians could control the conversation more directly. [SPEAKER_01]: It was kind of like having their own little broadcasting station.
[SPEAKER_01]: but Twitter was a whole different animal, was much more chaotic and interactive with politicians jumping onto ongoing conversations by taking over their hashtags. [SPEAKER_01]: They worked control in their own space that we're taking over years.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this was a perfect time for researchers to study this, because three countries, Norway, Australia and Germany all had national elections within just two weeks of each other in September of twenty-thirteen, with Italy having had there's earlier that year in February. [SPEAKER_01]: So this gave them a really unique snapshot of how different political cultures were adapting to this newer technology at the same time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Researchers found that politicians were using Twitter to get attention to all kinds of ways. [SPEAKER_01]: Some of them did use Twitter like a digital press release service with their staff just pushing out official statements. [SPEAKER_01]: Others got a lot more personal and conversational. [SPEAKER_01]: So the politicians account was maybe engaging directly with voters and answering their questions or responding their concerns.
[SPEAKER_01]: But in any case, politicians were fairly strategic with these carefully crafted messages. [SPEAKER_01]: But others seemed to just tweet whatever came to their mind at the time. [SPEAKER_01]: But these researchers could also see how politicians Twitter activity spiked around big campaign moments. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, major speeches, debates, or when a competitor said something stupid, or a stumbled, or whatever.
[SPEAKER_01]: So for the people doing these studies, following the social media was like watching the political pulse of each country in real time. [SPEAKER_01]: And they found that the themes that politicians were pushing on Twitter usually aligned with the way that the mainstream news was framing the campaign issues, but that sometimes Twitter did let politicians bring out different ideas or respond immediately to breaking this. [SPEAKER_01]: So these were kind of the early days.
[SPEAKER_01]: But then, back around twenty sixteen, researchers were starting to look into a really important question. [SPEAKER_01]: When politicians use social media strategically, can this actually translate into something concrete like cold hard cash for their campaigns? [SPEAKER_01]: Up until that point, most of us were focused on whether social media helped politicians educate voters or get people more engaged in politics or whether it influenced how people voted.
[SPEAKER_01]: But nobody really looked at the money side of things and money is pretty crucial. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, in American politics in particular, voting isn't required and we have quite a lot of disengaged citizens who don't really try to understand issues and candidates. [SPEAKER_01]: So paid ads are pretty much an essential tool to help turn these citizens into votes. [SPEAKER_01]: So fundraising can really make or break a campaign.
[SPEAKER_01]: So these researchers, macawianus, are decided to dig into the twenty sixteen senate races. [SPEAKER_01]: And see if they could find a direct connection between what candidates were posting on social media and how much money was coming into their campaign accounts. [SPEAKER_01]: They looked at all hundred and eight candidates running for senate in the general election and they got data from everywhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their social media posts, Google search trends about the candidates, how often people were looking up their Wikipedia pages, and their official donation records from the federal election commission. [SPEAKER_01]: The use of machine learning to categorize what politicians were posting and found that what they were actually talking about in their posts and what they discovered was pretty striking.
[SPEAKER_01]: They found that candidates who posted more frequently brought in more donation money overall, but it wasn't just about quantity, the content mattered too. [SPEAKER_01]: When politicians focused on actual policy issues and substantive topics, they could get higher donations. [SPEAKER_01]: but plot twist when they looked at the number of individual donations rather than the total dollar amounts.
[SPEAKER_01]: Post about campaigning itself, you know, the vote for me and rally announcements were actually more effective at getting people to open their wallets, even if those individual donors give less money to groups and packs. [SPEAKER_01]: As we got into the twenty-twenties and the Trump years, the strategy started to change.
[SPEAKER_01]: Amazing gaff's like coffee, a side, Trump was using Twitter, and it wasn't just random lit like nights, but it looked like a deliberate strategy to control what the news media was talking about. [SPEAKER_01]: So for decades, media outlets, like major newspapers and TV networks, had basically set the agenda for political conversations.
[SPEAKER_01]: They decided what stories were important, what we call their gatekeeping function, and politicians mostly had to respond to what the media chose to cover. [SPEAKER_01]: But social media, particularly Trump's aggressive use of Twitter, seemed to kind of flip that relationship on its head. [SPEAKER_01]: So the researchers decided to test a specific idea was Trump actually using Twitter to deliberately distract the media from stories that would maybe be damaging to him.
[SPEAKER_01]: They focused on the coverage of the Mueller investigation, which had sought to determine if there was illegal collaboration between the Russian government and Donald Trump's campaign. [SPEAKER_01]: And this was obviously a huge political threat to his presidency. [SPEAKER_01]: So the study looked at how major news outlets like the New York Times and ABC news covered that in relation to Trump's tweeting patterns.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what they found was remarkable because there was a clear pattern. [SPEAKER_01]: When the media had an increased number of stories about the Mueller investigation, it would immediately be followed by Trump going on Twitter and posting a lot about completely unrelated topics. [SPEAKER_01]: And then, now this is the key part. [SPEAKER_01]: After that story of tweets about other subjects, the major news outlets actually started covering the Mueller investigation less.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was like watching a magician work in real time. [SPEAKER_01]: When the media started paying more attention to Mueller, Trump would flood the zone with tweets about immigration, trade deals, nasty things about his political opponents, or whatever else, and the media would get pulled away from the Russian investigation to cover whatever controversy or statement Trump had just made. [SPEAKER_01]: And I make sure this wasn't just coincidence.
[SPEAKER_01]: The researchers tested their theory against other topics that weren't potentially threatening to trump things like Brexit coverage. [SPEAKER_01]: And they didn't see the same pattern there. [SPEAKER_01]: We're suggested it's not just a random correlation. [SPEAKER_01]: It looks like deliberate media manipulation. [SPEAKER_01]: And this was groundbreaking, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it showed that a public figure, even the president, could potentially use social media to actively set the news agenda rather than just respond to it. [SPEAKER_01]: who looked like Trump had figured out how to exploit the media's tendency to chase the latest shiny object using Twitter as a tool to steer coverage away from stories that might hurt him politically. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, there was another change, too.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the early Trump years, according to other researchers, these makers were getting increasingly emotional online, and it seemed to be working for them. [SPEAKER_01]: What caught the researchers' attention was how politicians' emotional intensity, like being confrontational, on platforms like Twitter, would change depending on what was happening in their political careers.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they tracked Trump's emotional expression on Twitter from when he started running for president in twenty fifteen all the way through his presidency until he left office in twenty twenty one and they found a clear trajectory. [SPEAKER_01]: Trump became progressively more emotional and negative in his online communication as this political journey intensified.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the researchers discovered that certain situations seem to ramp up that emotional intensity for politicians. [SPEAKER_01]: When they're gearing up for elections or dealing with the pressures of being an office, their social media posts become more charged. [SPEAKER_01]: And it wasn't just the political calendar driving this, there were also specific topics that triggered more emotional responses.
[SPEAKER_01]: For Trump, three subjects consistently made his tweets more emotionally intense. [SPEAKER_01]: Elections, which could be his own campaigns, his criticism of the election process and security. [SPEAKER_01]: Second was trade policy and the third was health care. [SPEAKER_01]: Whenever these topics came up, you could expect his Twitter feed to become more heated and negative. [SPEAKER_01]: And the really interesting part is that it worked.
[SPEAKER_01]: The researchers found that Trump's more emotional and negative tweets got a lot more public attention and engagement than neutral posts did. [SPEAKER_01]: people were more likely to respond, retweet, and engage with content that had strong emotional language, even if it was positive or negative. [SPEAKER_01]: And honestly, this is not a big surprise to me. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I have my own accounts on social media, and I regularly face a little bit of an internal battle.
[SPEAKER_01]: If I want to post things that seem partisan or that could make you and the audience feel a lot of joy or a lot of anger, I know that these posts are going to do better, right? [SPEAKER_01]: They'll get more engagement from you all. [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm too small to make money off my social media account. [SPEAKER_01]: But if I could, I would actually make more money if I use that kind of emotional language.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, it's important to me to be unbiased because I want the education I provide to reach people no matter what they already think. [SPEAKER_01]: So I really do have to be careful about this. [SPEAKER_01]: In a sense, it looks like politicians are just taking advantage of an already pretty well understood phenomenon. [SPEAKER_01]: The research concluded that emotional and negative posts were a strategy that had become an effective form of self-marketing for Trump.
[SPEAKER_01]: So those over the top and your face posting is not just an accidental by-product of stress or a sign of someone's personality. [SPEAKER_01]: It seems to serve a strategic purpose. [SPEAKER_01]: It cuts through the noise of social media and grabs people's attention in new and effective ways. [SPEAKER_01]: And today, it's even more sophisticated because newsmakers aren't limited to just a few social networks.
[SPEAKER_01]: They've also gotten even better at shaping what people talk about through their control of multiple streams of communication. [SPEAKER_01]: I need to take a quick break, but when I come back, we'll look overseas at how this has been seen in other countries. [SPEAKER_01]: I'll be right back. [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome back. [SPEAKER_01]: So we've talked about how politicians can use the emotionality of the media to affect people.
[SPEAKER_01]: It turns out that as time has gone on, they've also kind of got smarter about this, and it's not just an American thing. [SPEAKER_01]: So another research or an NHL cache looked at India's twenty-nineteen general election and found this really sophisticated operation where political organizers were using WhatsApp groups to artificially create social media trends through coordinated mass posting campaigns.
[SPEAKER_01]: The researchers managed to see inside six hundred what's app groups that were supporting the right wing party that ultimately won the election, the BJP. [SPEAKER_01]: And what they discovered inside those groups was essentially a political influence machine that was operating kind of in plain sight. [SPEAKER_01]: The way it worked was pretty clever. [SPEAKER_01]: Campaign organizers would send out what they called mobilization messages to these WhatsApp groups.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they contained lists of prewritten tweets along with specific hashtags that they wanted to trend. [SPEAKER_01]: Group members would then copy and paste these tweets and it would flood Twitter with identical or really similar content at coordinated times. [SPEAKER_01]: And that would artificially boost those hashtags into trending status. [SPEAKER_01]: The scale was pretty large.
[SPEAKER_01]: The researchers documented evidence of seventy-five different hashtag manipulation campaigns throughout the election period and his efforts successfully created hundreds of nationwide Twitter trends throughout the campaign. [SPEAKER_01]: It was kind of like having a volunteer army of social media users who could be activated at a moment's notice in order to push whatever message the party wanted to amplify.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what made this particularly interesting, I think, from a research perspective and from my perspective as a social media user, is that it blurs the lines between authentic grassroots support and artificial manipulation, right, because these were not bots or fake accounts. [SPEAKER_01]: These were real people who were voluntarily participating in coordinated campaigns.
[SPEAKER_01]: The party had figured out how to harness real and supporter enthusiasm and to channel it through the strategy and they did it with just everyday technologies. [SPEAKER_01]: And this showed that political parties with a lot of popular support can amplify their reach pretty far beyond their existing supporters. [SPEAKER_01]: If they coordinate their existing audience, they make their messages seem a lot more popular and more widespread than what have happened organically.
[SPEAKER_01]: This can influence undecided voters who see trending topics and assume that they reflect what other people think. [SPEAKER_01]: So this means some tough questions about what is legitimate political participation in the digital age. [SPEAKER_01]: On one hand, it was real supporters of all and terribly spreading messages. [SPEAKER_01]: On the other, this coordinated campaign created artificial trends that could mislead other people.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, across the world, in Turkey, another researcher looked at the fallout of a terrorist attack in Istanbul's Talks and Square in twenty-twenty-two. [SPEAKER_01]: And she found that something interesting happened on social media that really challenges how we think about who gets to control information during crisis events.
[SPEAKER_01]: So right after the attack, which did kill and injure several people, Turkish citizens spontaneously created the hashtag taxum, to share information and express how they felt about it. [SPEAKER_01]: So this seems like a perfect example of how social media democratizes information right regular people can bypass those gatekeepers and they can share real-time updates and emotionally support each other directly.
[SPEAKER_01]: But researchers who analyzed nearly two hundred and eighty-five thousand tweets using the tax and hashtag discovered something more complicated. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, anyone could post with the hashtag. [SPEAKER_01]: The voices that rose to the top and became the most influential were not ordinary citizens. [SPEAKER_01]: They were the same types of people who have always been those gatekeepers, politicians and mainstream media journalists.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this happened through Twitter's own inner workings. [SPEAKER_01]: The tweets that got the most retweets, likes, replies, and quote tweets, which made them more visible to more people. [SPEAKER_01]: Mostly came from these prominent folks. [SPEAKER_01]: So even though the platform was theoretically open to everyone, the old gatekeepers ended up becoming the new gatekeepers, just in a new way.
[SPEAKER_01]: And researchers found that the users who became the most prominent in the taxome conversation weren't just sharing basic information. [SPEAKER_01]: There were the ones who were connecting the incident to broader controversial political issues that people were already talking about in Turkey, things like a refugee situation and internet freedom.
[SPEAKER_01]: So by a gender surfing, by linking the immediate crisis to these ongoing political debates, these users got people to listen to them. [SPEAKER_01]: Visual content was also really important, and users who included powerful pictures or video with their posts were much more likely to see their posts go viral. [SPEAKER_01]: So why does this matter? [SPEAKER_01]: Well, we might need to rethink our assumptions about social media is giving everyone a voice when we're in crisis.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because platforms like Twitter could let people share information. [SPEAKER_01]: But the same old factors that have always determined whose voices get heard, you know, if it's a lead status, if it's resources, if it's good communication strategies, that still matters a lot. [SPEAKER_01]: It's still really hard for little guys to get a big audience. [SPEAKER_01]: So newsmakers have a lot to say about what you see on social media and they use a bunch of strategies.
[SPEAKER_01]: So these as coordinated campaigns that take advantage of social media algorithms by flooding the network with content they want to share. [SPEAKER_01]: When big media events happen, you know, you can think presidential debates, major speeches, election light coverage, you have millions of people who are essentially doing the same thing at the same time. [SPEAKER_01]: They are watching TV while simultaneously scrolling through social media on their phones or tablets or laptops.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this creates what researchers call shared attention, where everyone's focus is concentrated at the same moment. [SPEAKER_01]: Researchers in the last three hundred million tweets from two hundred thousand politically active Twitter users during eight major events throughout the twenty twelve election, and found that these media events don't just generate more social media activity. [SPEAKER_01]: They fundamentally change how people interact online.
[SPEAKER_01]: During these events in the counterintuitive happens, even then more people are posting, there's actually less conversation between normal people. [SPEAKER_01]: People stop chatting back and forth with their friends and become much more focused on amplifying and responding to a small number of prominent voices. [SPEAKER_01]: It's like everyone stops having their own conversations and starts crowding around to listen to the same few people.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's a golden opportunity for elites like politicians, journalists, celebrities, other influential figures. [SPEAKER_01]: During this media events, that usual scattered attention to social media users becomes a laser-focused and these elite counts can win big. [SPEAKER_01]: They see massive spikes in their engagement because everyone is tuned into the same time and is looking for authoritative voices to help them process what they're watching. [SPEAKER_01]: And they know it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Influencers in political elites have figured out that media events are like social media goal brushes. [SPEAKER_01]: It's hard to compete for attention in the usual social media world. [SPEAKER_01]: You know, we're trending topics would be everything from sports to celebrities to hot restaurants.
[SPEAKER_01]: So elites have learned [SPEAKER_01]: To time, they're most important messages to match those moments when they know millions of people will be paying attention at the same time. [SPEAKER_01]: A tweet posted during a presidential debate, for example, can be seen by exponentially more people than that same tweet posted on a random Tuesday afternoon, just because of the concentrated attention from those events.
[SPEAKER_01]: And using the hashtag from those events, let's you agenda surf. [SPEAKER_01]: Research says that creating media events essentially changes social media from its usual chaotic multi-directional conversation speech for everyone into something more like a traditional broadcast or where a few voices grow there already massive audiences.
[SPEAKER_01]: And for influencers who understand this, it's a powerful tool for building their following at times when the entire digital audience is essentially engaged. [SPEAKER_01]: So it's just a bit of think about what you think about who drives or benefits from the conversation on social media. [SPEAKER_01]: I think they have a great week to his seekers and stay sharp. [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for getting unspunged with me this week.
[SPEAKER_01]: Unspung is a production of me Amanda Sturgeon and is a proud member of the MSW Media Family of podcasts. [SPEAKER_01]: Some of your thoughts and ideas about trickery and the news on Gmail at the unspunpodcast at gmail.com. [SPEAKER_01]: I even write back. [SPEAKER_01]: And find this episode show notes and more information at the unspunpodcast.substack.com. [SPEAKER_01]: Want to learn more and get smarter?
[SPEAKER_01]: Check out my book, Detecting Disception Tools to Fight Fake News, which is available on Amazon or your favorite online bookseller. [SPEAKER_01]: And until next time, stay sharp, everyone.