Vortex of the Web. Potentials of the online environment

From Spiral of Silence to Nexus of Noise:

The latest – and maybe most revealing – example of the populist, social media-oriented modus operandi of Austria’s new government has been provided by Karoline Edtstadler, Secretary of State at the Federal Ministry of the Interior and member of Kurz’ movement/party/personality cult. In perfect coherence to Colin Crouch (2004) and his definition of the post-democratic condition, she justified a controversially discussed law reform regarding sexual delinquents as corresponding to a perceived notion of natural justice that she declared to deduce directly from respective postings on Facebook and Twitter in the course of an interview on February 5, 2018 (Mayer, 2018).
It seems that the deduction is free from consideration of the unarguably limited ability for any of the strongly emotional content generated on these social media channels to produce balanced and objective views and arguments – next to presenting distorted representations of a perceived public opinion generated by algorithms – as well as acknowledgment of considerable criticism of opposing law experts. Similar to the somehow misleading idea of direct democracy in form of a referendum or vote, the conception of Edtstadler – stressing her obligation to push the agendas of anonymously acting shot callers on selected communication platforms as a primary guideline for her political mandate – unmistakenly demonstrates the post-democratic, populist conception of the politician as a faithful servant to the dictate of an intentionally perceived – or even self-adjusted – majority. Borrowing from the Crusaders, the convenient justification Facebook lo vult – Mob willing – comes into mind. Interestingly enough, only a few days later, the opportunist character of Kurz and his right-wing coalition partner was further underlined by the demonstrated determination to simply ignore a petition signed by more than 500.000 citizens that opted for a continuation of a general smoking ban and their determination to push things through on a parliamentary level before a referendum on the issue could be scheduled (Richter, 2018).
Either the displayed perception of Edstadler is simply revealing her illiteracy in terms of competence to decode our contemporary media surrounding or a cold-blooded instrumentalization of the random and distorting momentum that large parts of online communication patterns can be attributed with. While the latter seems to be common practice among political actors around the world, as demonstrated earlier, Edtstadler provides evidence to assume the previous possibility by her statement. Positioning postings on social media channels as directly analogues with the perception of the population serves to present Noelle-Neumann’s Spiral of Silence (Noelle-Neumann, 1978) with a reversed juxtapose of a presumed Nexus of Noise. This perspective is supported by a recent study of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD, 2017) that demonstrates that a loud minority actively orchestrated social media campaigns against refugees during the elections in Germany. The research revealed that half of the likes signalizing support for hate-comments can be traced back to only five percent of the user accounts on the selected platforms. On top of it, the extremely active core of this minority – twenty-five percent of these likes seem to be generated by only one percent of the user profiles – deliberately aim at manipulating social media algorithms to magnify its impact. Coordinated activity along agreed upon timelines or the use of Hashtags are employed to boost the ranking of these contributions and therefore wrongly suggest their relevance to a broader part of the public. A ‘‘monumental deception’’ in the words of analyst Philip Kreißl (DPA, 2018), that is mainly generated by supporters of right-wing movements, as the study further reveals. Muslims and refugees list as the prime targets of these attacks in Austria, according to a report of the counter-initiative #GegenHassimNetz (eho, 2018).
Therefore, Edtstadler’s statement is drastically demonstrating the urgent need for educational measurements that help to build a wide scale media literacy, hopefully providing for the progression of the mistakenly presumed or self-declared digital natives into a critical mass of digitally civilized entities. Equipped with a basic core competence for realistically evaluating and critically questioning the actual relevance of our digital surrounding, we would less likely fall into the trap of interpreting psychologically triggered digital counterparts of the Tourette syndrom as significant events. However, the rather disturbing example of Edtstadler shows that many of us are still at the stage of running for their lives in order to escape the approaching train – if we draw a parallel to the dawning of the Cinematic Age.
Big Data, Micro-targeting and Social Manipuledia
Unfortunately, such much needed discourse is buried under loads of Social Media Management and E-Marketing courses in the curriculum of Communication Faculties. Especially, considering the urgent need for a distant look and critical reflection of where the implementation of a never-ending flood of mediated distractions in our daily life has led us in regard to our condition as democratic citizens, political actors and conscientious human beings in full command of their critical capacities – and where we aim to draw the line between convenience and reason. However, with the dramatically changing demographic composition of Zuckerberg’s social media giant, that – in its fourteenth year – suffers from a massive loss of young blood and strongly gains users from over fifty-five years of age instead (Sweney, 2018), one is curious to see the nature, impact and degree of centralization of the alternative media channels that the economically more significant group of users is migrating to and its consequences for democratic developments.
Latest disclosures by Christopher Wylie in the wave of the Cambridge Analytica scandal put even more public and political pressure on the tumbling giant. Under the umbrella of Cambridge Analytica, notorious for their involvement in the Brexit-campaign 2016 (Cadwalladr, 2017), Aleksandr Kogan, Professor of Psychology at Cambridge University, had created a Facebook-App named ‘Thisismydigitallife’ for his enterprise Global Science Research that had more than 270.000 downloaders doing a personality test (Cadwalladr & Graham-Harrison, 2018). However, by accepting the Terms of Trade, they also agreed to the use of their data for ‘scientific purposes’ as well as authorization of scanning the profiles of their added friends on base of the critically discussed ‘Third Party Consent’. The final heist consisted of personal data of about ninety million Facebook accounts and got analyzed by a program the whistleblower Wylie had developed. As Wylie put it: ‘We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons’ (Cadwalladr & Graham-Harrison, 2018, para 3). The results had been sold to strategically support the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. SCL Group, the mother company of Cambridge Analytics, had Breitbart-mastermind and Trump-stablemate Steve Bannon as a board member from 2014 to 2016 and on top of it received $15 million by Trump-financer Robert Mercer (Cadwalladr, 2018). Only a few days after Wylie went public, a Channel 4 video surfaced (Revealed: Trump’s election consultants filmed saying they use bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians, 2018) that has Cambridge Analytica-boss Alexander Nix boasting to potential clients in the course of an undercover report. He claimed that the data analysis provided by the organization had helped to critically influence more than two hundred elections all over the word – from India, to the Czech Republic and Argentinia to Nigeria. He further claimed responsibility for the election of Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta – a campaign that was characterized by deliberate desinformation that targeted political opponents. Next to Nix being suspended from his position, British authorities, in a first reaction, issued orders to search the organization’s headquarters in London (Elgot, 2018). At the same time, the British Parliament, as well as the European Parliament and the US Senate, have issued requests for Zuckerberg to justify himself in front of their institutions (Reuters, 2018). Furthermore, investors filed lawsuits against Facebook, making the company lose about $60 billion of market value within two days. With Zuckerberg dressed up in suit and tie, humbly admitting his mistake in front of teethless US-interrogators, some had hoped it would be up to the European Parliament to put him on the hot seat. These expectations were grounded on consistent hints towards governmental strategies to impose stronger regulations on Facebook in Europe – as suggested by EU-commissioner Margarethe Vestager since quite a while (Rice, 2018).