91Èȱ¬

Clickbait, the seemingly endless and distracting content that dominates social media, is something we encounter every day. Much of it is made up of fast-paced and eye-catching videos that offer us apparently ingenious cooking, cleaning and health tips, and much more besides. Few of us probe or question the source of it, or the information that it imparts.

In The Digital Human episode, 5 Minutes, social psychologist Alex Krotoski looks at what lies behind these life hacks in terms of their wisdom and their unexpected origins, and uncovers more examples of social media manipulation along the way.

Probing further, Jarvis found that Bright Side content, as with 5-Minute Crafts, was copyrighted to a company called TheSoul Publishing. Pumping out 1,500 videos a month. TheSoul was also on the radar of Lisa Kaplan, CEO of the Alethea Group which tackles social media manipulation.

“Originally called Ad Me, TheSoul Publishing (TSP) was founded in Kazan, Russia in 2004 before moving to Limassol, Cyprus and establishing US and UK entities in the summer of 2018,” Lisa explains. During this time, TSP went from relative obscurity to being the third biggest entertainment company after Disney and Comcast. While the overwhelming majority of its YouTube content is craft videos, there was a small amount of political content, including a video about Russian history narrated by a banana that praised Joseph Stalin as a “Russian Robin Hood”, among other examples of sanitising content. A media furore in the US followed, after which TSP removed what they admitted were “embarrassing” videos.

TheSoul Publishing did not break the law, as Aleks points out, but she believes that they are “canaries in the coalmine for something more seriously wrong at the heart of the internet.”

Lisa Kaplan further describes the internet’s problem as “multiple organised, well-funded players [be they state actors, political parties or other organised groups] playing games of digital chess, trying to reach you with information that will help them to further their goal… behave a certain way, buy a certain product, not vote in an election, or vote for a candidate that you wouldn’t normally vote for.”

Astroturfing – not a level playing field

Riffing on the idea of a "grassroots" movement, "astroturfing" is the name given to a centralised and organised campaign that pretends to be a genuine and popular online movement. Among manufacturers of such campaigns are the now infamous Internet Research Agency (IRA) based in St Petersburg, Russia, and the 50 Cent Party in China, both putting out posts and tweets designed to further the interest of their respective regimes and national groups (e.g. businesses). In the case of the IRA, it is claimed that they tried to influence the 2016 UK Referendum on the European Union in favour of Leave and the 2016 US Presidential election in favour of Trump. Franziska B. Keller, assistant professor at the Social Science Division of Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, says that sharing the same message can give the appearance of credibility, although some attempts will struggle to get out of their own echo chamber.

A story from the US illustrates the kind of mania that social media manipulation can create around an issue – even if it is unmasked. Pro-gun groups were accused of astroturfing the activities of The Reopen America campaign to end the lockdown measures put in place because of the Coronavirus pandemic. While some domain names were being used by such groups, it was found that the vast majority were being bought up to stop their use for astroturfing. The purchaser, Michael Murphy, who describes himself as an “old hippie” was then on the receiving end of a "pile-on" from liberals via phone Twitter (where his contact details were posted) and email; he was also hacked. The back-firing venture cost him $4,000.

Lessons from history

The internet has allowed society to avoid gatekeepers. Now, as Alex Krotoski acknowledges, we have “crossed the Rubicon” to where there are so many voices that “we don’t know who to believe, so the loudest, the ones that manipulate the business models, are the ones that are heard.”

“We have to become our own gatekeepers… we have to be critical consumers. If we don’t, we will find ourselves in the same position we were in before the internet arrived – disempowered, side-lined and silenced.”