This series was my attempt to figure out what was going on around me that led to the election of Impeached Donald Trump. (Note, words I bold are Resistance Words and I will be doing diaries or articles about each one.)
We have to join together in a new resistance movement with our own words. And as William Barber says “Rise Above The Snake Line. Using words is the peaceful way. The alternative is to cut the head off the snake.
See video below for explanation of the snake metaphor. And beyond that is a reprint of the article that inspired me to make the above graphic.
Below Is A Reprint Of An Article I Did Last Year
This Street Prophets Coffee Hour is brought to you by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. Today’s article, Network Propaganda, is part 12 of 15 in a series about figuring out just what is going on in American politics. It will be about how we got to where we are now. And hopefully present a story of where we should be going. Along the way we will take a look at Russia, the U.S. 2016 Presidential election, Memes and Fiction, Network Propaganda, soft warfare, and cyberwarfare.
This is an Open Thread and all topics of conversation are welcome. What is for dinner? How are you doing? What is on your mind. If you are new to Street Prophets please introduce yourself below in a comment.
Last week in part 11 of this series we covered the Harvard Study on the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Presented was the Key Takeaways of the study and a few excerpts from the executive summary. This study only covered data up to the election and was limited in its analysis. Reviewing part 11 is recommend before reading today’s article.
Today’s diary is about the recently released book called Network Propaganda. This book was released under a creative commons license so I’m able to quote passages and show images freely from the study. Also, the entire book is available for free to download as a PDF.
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Network Propaganda builds on the initial Harvard Study 2016 pre-election data and looks at the post-election data from the year after the election. It gives a far more detailed analysis of the results presented in the key takeaways in part 11.
The authors, Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts assert that the manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in the political network ecology is entirely due to Conservative ideology not because of new technology or Russian interference.
Russia, the authors report, while extremely active in pursuing their agenda to destabilize the west, had far less effect than is popularly thought or presented by Timothy Snyder’s book: The Road To Unfreedom introduced in part 2 of this series.
The results and conclusions in Network Propaganda are based on 4 million national political stories found on the web during April 2015 through January 2018. Content producer’s websites, Twitter and FaceBook posts and links were analyzed using mixed methods that included network analysis, text analysis, and data-guided qualitative case studies. In addition they did a basic historical political economy study ranging over 40 years. An analysis tool called Media Cloud was used to grind through the 4 million sources to extract the patterns presented in the figures and tables presented in the studies.
Figure 10.1 Partisanship in voting patterns in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1949– 2011. Click to Enlarge.
I must say the Network Propaganda authors arrived at a conclusion that I did not expect. The major conclusion, that comes from the historical political economy study can be visualized in Figure 10.1 Partisanship in voting patterns in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1949– 2011. Click to Enlarge.
Figure 10.1 shows the evolution of the political polarization by using Media Cloud to generate a network map. It is based on congressional voting records from 1940 to 2011. House representatives are the nodes and shared roll call votes between pairs of representatives are the edges. The take away from the map is the polarization trend was present before the internet emerged.
The study comes to the conclusion that the historical record identifies three “forces” that forms the “axis of evil “ that caused the polarization.
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White Identity Politics
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Weaponized Religion
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Organized Business
Chapter 4 of Network Propaganda explores the history of White Identity Politics and arrives at the conclusion that it is the intentional product of the Southern Strategy. The second member of the axis is Weaponized Religion driven by the backlash against the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the destabilization of the patriarchal family structure by the Women’s Movement. And the last member of the axis is political organized business was driven by deregulation and tax reduction leading to reduced state power.
Both the extensive political science literature on polarization and the rich literature on American media history argue against “the internet did it” narratives. Instead, we suggest that technological, institutional, and political dynamics have been interacting for over 40 years to lead the Republican Party and Republican voters to gradually become more extreme versions of themselves, without operating symmetrically on the Democratic Party and its supporters or on most Independents. The 2016 presidential election was the moment at which these long- term dynamics reached an inflection point in the Republican Party, but not among Democrats. — From: Network Propaganda PDF (292)
The reader should understand that nothing introduced in Network Propaganda contradicts the main ideas by other authors as presented in this series. What this study does is clearly identify the underlying forces shaping the current political ecology. And it allows us to better rank the importance of all the factors covered in this series. With the axis identified above being of primary concern.
For those readers that can stream YouTube here is a video introducing the book. For those the are unable to view the video the some of the highlights of the book will be covered beyond the fold with a number of direct quotes and diagrams from the book.
This article is continued after the fold. The comments for this article are are after community links and its sub thread.
Please limit community links to one per user because we want to encourage greater diversity of submissions of community links from different users. In the case of a needed fundraiser, either the member in need will write a diary or someone will do it on their behalf. That diary is then linked to in the comments. Please only post community links in community links comment provided.
Sorry for any errors in grammar and spelling in my writing. I had to toss this diary together quickly this morning. And with the death and destruction around us I have to stop hiding my writing under the Street Prophets group and just write and publish as quickly as I can.
When I get the Resistance Words group up and running I’m hoping to use the group editing function and get assistance in proofing and editing. So far I have been working alone on my project. The next installment in this series about Resistance Words is on Stochastic Terrorism. An expression created by Daily Kos member G2geek.
Everyone take care of yourself and your loved ones.
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