Misinformation Culture War: Post-truth and the Case of
QAnon
Understanding the role of conspiracy theories in a
hyperpolarized media ecosystem in the United States
Filippo Fagnoni
MA Thesis
University of Amsterdam
Programme: Media Studies Track: New Media & Digital Culture
Referencing: Chicago
Index
Index ... 1
Abstract ... 4
Introduction ... 5
1. Theory 1.1: How Did We Get Here? Genealogy of the American Cultural and Media Divide ... 10
Culture Wars Predating the Internet ... 10
Online Culture Wars ... 15
Post-Truth ... 23
1.2: The New Conspiracism: The Deligitimation of Democracy and the Eclipse of Truth ... 28
Conspiracy Theories as Tools to Obscure Established Narratives ... 28
The New Conspiracism... 32
QAnon: The Great Awakening... 38
2. Methodology: Studying QAnon within the YouTube Ecosystem ... 44
2.1. Building Datasets From YouTube ... 44
2.2. Using YouTube Data Tools and Gephi ... 47
3. Operationalization: Determining YouTube’s Role in QAnon Network ... 48
3.1. Quantitative Analysis of QAnon Channels on YouTube ... 48
3.2. Qualitative Analysis of QAnon Videos on YouTube ... 57
3.2.1. “Q - The Plan To Save The World REMASTERED” By Joe M ... 58
3.2.2. “Q&A With #OutOfShadows’ Brad Martin w/ Host @CoralineElise” by IntheMatrixxx ... 61
3.2.3. “Q anon 11/11/18 Let the Unsealing Begin” by SpaceShot76 ... 65
Conclusions ... 68
Works Cited ... 72
Acknowledgements
The realization of this thesis would not have been possible without the terrific network of support around me. Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor Marc Tuters for guiding me through the complex web of reflecting on, identifying, and constructing a comprehensive thesis project. His prior work in the field, along with other great professors, gave me the inspiration to pursue my topic with enthusiasm and inquisitiveness. His advice helped significantly in producing my best work through my writing process. I would like to thank the program’s coordinators, for enabling me to further my curiosity in a safe and accepting environment. I would like to thank my close friends, who made this year wonderful and vibrant, continuously supporting me even when things became challenging. While working on this thesis, many of you have helped me in a multitude of ways which were imperative, directly or indirectly, to its completion. I will never forget the endless library nights, study sessions, last-minute deadlines and celebratory beers. I would like to thank my family for assisting me through my study years, encouraging me and inspiring me every step of the way. Above all, I want to express my gratitude and appreciation for my wonderful parents – for giving me all the space to dream, live, and love ceaselessly in this confusing, yet beautiful world. I owe it all to you, your devotion and your care for my dreams to become reality.
Abstract
This research is concerned with understanding the role of conspiracy theories in the augmentation of a post-truth, hyper-polarized media ecosystem in the United States. The exacerbation of culture wars within American culture, politics, and media in the digital age has aggravated a fractured media ecosystem, manifesting itself through the acceleration of misinformation, repeated falsehoods, and opinion-based realities in contrast to evidence-based actualities. In the period following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, awareness and prominence of right-wing nationalism, populist fringe movements, conspiracy theories, and extremist ideologies have intensified considerably within national public discourse. During this period, the normalization of misinformation and conspiratorial frameworks went mainstream, starkly reinforced by a systematic vilification of the free press, mainstream media, news outlets, mass communication, and knowledge-producing institutions. The polarity compounded by a surge of post-truth elements within the media ecosystem left fertile ground for the emergence of conspiracy theories which have been capable of forming new political and cultural movements, aided by the design and affordances of dominant digital platforms such as YouTube and Twitter. These conspiracy theories have been able to diffuse from the periphery of the American media to its nucleus, propagating from anonymous imageboards such as 4chan to social media platforms and mainstream media outlets. A new form of conspiracism, based on repetition rather than evidence, has taken a solid foothold in American political thought, reinforced by its media apparatus; as such, the QAnon conspiracy theory was chosen as a case study. Through theoretical framework, quantitative and qualitative analysis, this thesis uncovers a deeper understanding of the conspiracy’s roots, the long standing division within American media that has enabled these conspiracy theories to surface in mainstream thought, and a current overview of the interconnected QAnon network within the YouTube ecosystem. Together, these results suggest that the American media’s polarity is further compounded by the contemporaneous erosion of truth, the denigration of knowledge-producing institutions, and the emergence of cultural and political movements stemming from conspiracy theories born, and augmented, within the digital sphere.
Keywords:
Introduction
On July 31st, 2018, in the midst of the United States’ summer midterm rallies, U.S. President Donald J. Trump spoke to a packed, impassioned crowd at the Florida State Fairgrounds in Tampa, Florida. Broadcasted on major television outlets and streamed live on social media, mainstream media viewers were exposed for the first time to a fringe movement revolving around the right-wing, pro-Trump conspiracy “QAnon.” Large cardboard cutouts depicting the letter Q flashed intermittently in the audience, while banners with “We Are Q” and “#QAnon” could be witnessed around the rally grounds. Rally attendees were spotted wearing t-shirts with a large letter Q printed on the frontside. Handmade posters with QAnon’s slogans “Where We Go One, We Go All” and “The Great Awakening” were held high between a sea of red “Make America Great Again” ballcaps. The unique, en-masse presence of QAnon supporters at the Tampa rally seemed to reveal just the beginning of the offline manifestation of a conspiracy theory born and cultivated online. Just four months later, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence tweeted a picture, then quickly deleted it, of himself about to board Air Force Two posing with a Florida SWAT team sheriff’s deputy sporting a “Q” patch on his uniform and the phrase “Question the Narrative.” In March of 2019, the Gambino crime family underboss Frank Cali was shot ten times by Anthony Comello, an avid follower of QAnon who believed Cali to be a member of the deep state, an alleged conglomerate of liberal elites and celebrities who clasp a firm grip over the United States government, its intelligence agencies, and the decision-making power behind national secrets and institutions (McIntire & Roose 2020; Laviola, 2018). At a court appearance, Comello displayed the “Q” symbol and the phrase “MAGA Forever”1 scribbled on his palms. As of January 2020, more than twenty candidates running campaigns for U.S. Congress openly supported the QAnon conspiracy theory and engaged with QAnon content on their social media accounts (Relman, 2019). The conspiracy is growing at an alarming rate on social media platforms such as YouTube and Twitter, generating interconnected networks of influence, accelerating a diffusion of misinformation and unverifiable claims in the media ecosystem as well as attracting considerable support from anti-government militias and movements both nationally and more recently, globally (Kelley, 2019; Collins and Zadrozny, 2020). President Trump, while never directly supporting the QAnon
1 MAGA is an acronym for “Make America Great Again”, the slogan used by then-presidential candidate Donald J.
Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. Oftentimes, the slogan is abbreviated to MAGA. Supporters use the acronym often, especially on social media platforms such as Twitter.
conspiracy from his official social media accounts or statements, has retweeted and engaged with diverse QAnon slogans, mottos, memetic or visual content, or Twitter accounts (Relman, 2019; Kharakh and Primack, 2016). In March 2019, the book QAnon: An Invitation to The Great Awakening, written by a collective of devout followers of the conspiracy theory, became an Amazon best seller, topping the ‘Censorship & Politics’ category (Porter, 2019). As of May 2020, the book remains in the top thirty best-selling books in three Amazon categories.
QAnon, a conspiracy turned into a cultural and political movement, was born on fringe imageboards and discussion forums of the Internet. It transfigured into a mainstream conspiratorial phenomenon through the contemporary diffusion of radical ideas from peripheral corners of the Web to the nucleus of the established media ecosystem; extensively, transforming this ecosystem’s structure. Through collective action and the process of redpilling2, extremist ideologies and
conspiracy theories are ever-growing within digital platforms accessed by a majority of society. How did a conspiracy theory native to marginal corners of the Internet pervade dominant social media platforms, permeating to mainstream media and diffusing to mass audiences? More importantly, how do the followers of QAnon organize to form a solid network that reinforces their ideas on dominant digital platforms such as YouTube?
Since 2016, many of the diverse conspiracy theories that filtered into mainstream media and social networks originated in the depths of 4chan, the notorious anonymous imageboard founded by Cristopher Poole in 2003. The product of a then-15-year-old student from New York City, 4chan rapidly established itself as the most popular reservoir of English-language imageboards (Tuters & De Zeeuw, 2019), uniquely shaped by virtually non-existent moderation, short-term post longevity and a cardinal principle of anonymity. One of the Internet’s most trafficked imageboards, the present-day content found on 4chan differs greatly from its inception. It revolved primarily around anime, manga, and video games, sharing visual content as a basis for discussion (Wendling, 2018). 4chan’s evolution from a rendezvous of Japanese pornographic art enthusiasts to the chief platform of reactionary radical movements, the alt-right, and conspiracy theories is a long and unique progression, one that situates 4chan at the substratum of the of current polarization within America’s media ecosystem.
2 Redpilling is an important term of the alt-right’s framework and the proliferation of radical ideas made common
across the new conservative right by Richard Spencer (Nagle, 2017). The metaphor encompasses a masculinist, anti-feminist political subcultures that encircle diverse strata of the online far right. Refer to Appendix III for theoretical framing concerning redpilling.
In the aftermath of Donald J. Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, awareness of the impact of right-wing nationalist and populist fringe movements in national discourse intensified considerably. As marginal ideologies, theories and misinformation continue to diffuse through the mainstream media, stimulated by the interfaces and affordances of digital platforms, much scrutiny has been placed on the effects this has had on the authenticity of knowledge. Through systematic use of rhetoric in line with populism since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the diminishing role of rational discourse and fact-based public knowledge has paved the way for the vilification of established media outlets and the growth of repetition-based, alternative knowledge-production on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter among others. In the period starting approximately around the 2016 election, YouTube transformed into a platform which cultivates the growth of darker, more toxic communities (Rogers, 2019). As cultural objects and content increasingly travel from subcultural communities to mainstream platforms, YouTube specifically came under intense scrutiny for its spread of far right ideas on the platform (Tokmetzis, 2019). While the early days of user-generated content were composed of amateur personalities, the current YouTube ecosystem and its evolution as a major media outlet has enabled it to become an effective commercial and propaganda platform. YouTube has unilaterally become an “enormous engine of cultural production and a host for wildly diverse communities” (Herrman, 2017), elevating its importance as a global discourse platform.
Following the election, the normalization of misinformation, anti-mainstream frameworks and conspiratorial thought alongside the embrace of extremist views went mainstream (Makutani, 2018), reinforced by a propagandistic wave commending distrust of the media, news outlets, and mass communication. A crucial component of anti-mainstream online culture was conspiracism (Happer et al., 2019); vastly present throughout history predating the Internet but liberated and compounded by the digital complex. Consequently, the emergence of fake news, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories intertwined with deliberate attacks on the free press, the delegitimation of knowledge-producing institutions by high-ranking political officials, and the development of a novel insulated right-wing media ecosystem only exacerbated an era of post-truth (Benkler et al., 2018; Tuters et al., 2018). In a post-truth world, the nature and significance of truth has eclipsed and has been made irrelevant; its consequences may pose serious threats to the future of knowledge-producing institutions as pillars of evidence-based reality, relayed to society through an established and trustworthy news and media ecology. In this post-truth era, the emergence of
conspiracy theories as part of mainstream thought and a factor in the deligitimation of verifiable facts is extensive, and its ramifications detrimental to the canons of democracy and liberalism. The reliance on conspiracy theories to explain certain phenomena has become prevalent in U.S. political rhetoric, where conspiracist thought aided the decreasing credence in institutions has moved conspiracy theories from the margins of American political life to its nucleus (Muirhead and Rosenblum, 2019). As the post-2016 formation of an insulated right-wing media ecosystem aggravates the diffusion of conspiracy theories and raises issues on the negative effects of repeated falsehoods in an open digital society, the topics central to this thesis present a relevant and timely study not solely on how this phenomenon occurred, but also how it may evolve and what actions can be taken in an informed, proactive framework.
In this thesis, I will explore how conspiracy theories contribute to a hyper-polarized media ecosystem in the United States, and how the extensive media polarity following the 2016 election has exacerbated a divided media ecosystem that is both unpredictably dangerous to the dissemination of misinformation and capable of forming new political and cultural movements. To achieve this, I have split the first portion of my thesis in two theoretical subchapters. Firstly, understanding the long-standing, fracture within American media, politics, and culture before and during the digital age poses a crucial framework in which to understand the diffusion of radical right-wing ideas and conspiracies in the mainstream. The extensive ideological dualism within American culture, driven by political affiliation and their specific cultural milieus, is enhanced by and institutionalized through the media in which particular discussions take place (Hunter, 2001), shifting the culture wars central to the American identitary fabric to the overpowering influence of the current digital media sphere. Secondly, understanding the role of a new type of conspiracism, born and perpetuated through the affordances and design of digital ecosystems and cultural shifts (Muirhead and Rosenblum, 2019) offers further intuitions on how conspiracy theories thrive and expand in the current state of American and global media.
To contextualize the diffusion of conspiracy theories such as QAnon in the alternative media ecosystem, the third section of this thesis operationalizes a methodological framework centered around the use of YouTube Data Tools, analyzing networks of influence within QAnon content creators on the YouTube platform. Both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the QAnon network on YouTube will aid in providing insights to the phenomenon of conspiracy theories on mainstream digital platforms, and conventional media use. As a result of YouTube’s
influence in the current ecosystem, findings suggest that YouTube’s role as an enabler lays the groundwork for conspiracy theories like QAnon to reach a wide audience with information relating to their worldview, and accelerates their prominence in American culture and politics through the creation of a reinforcing network on the platform. Challenging the established knowledge-producing structures and institutions, the era of post-truth and the diverse affordances of digital platforms enable the propagation of conspiracy theories and motivated-based reasoning, circumventing the authority of fact-based knowledge, established narratives in lieu of narratives that confirm individuals’ or groups’ pre-existing biases. As distrust in the gatekeepers of mainstream media and other vital knowledge-producing institutions amplifies, conspiracy theories are accelerating and augmenting the long standing media polarity in the United States. The growing reliance on opinion-based facts as opposed to evidence for the construction of reality is hazardous to the preservation of democratic canons and the expansion or progression of the confidence within our digital ecosystem. As the rejection of confirmed chronicles of facts and events is increasingly being normalized and replaced by untruth and erroneous information, comprehending the ways in which conspiracism is actively underpinning a vigorous shift within the media ecosystem is imperative in identifying the steps involved in the re-implementation of truth, authenticity, and extensively, equilibrium.
1. Theory
1.1 How Did We Get Here? Genealogy of the American Cultural and Media
Divide
Culture Wars Predating the Internet
The term culture war derives from a translation of the German word Kulturkampf, meaning “culture struggle.” During the 1800s, the term was primarily used to describe the various religious and cultural disputes between different groups of the German Empire opposed to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church (Spahn, 1910), which precipitated the shifting and fracturing of political ideologies toward the middle of the century. The term kulturkampf’s contemporary significance was coined in American politics in 1991, with the publication of Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America by sociologist James Davison Hunter. In the book, Hunter identified a substantial political reorientation and polarization tracing back to the 1960s, resulting in a considerable reconfiguration of American politics and culture across a number of issues - among them education, immigration, privacy, gun law reform, abortion, recreational drug use, gay and lesbian rights, censorship and civil rights. According to Hunter, these particular issues do not have a middle ground, and are issues imperative to an individual’s vision of the world. Such issues demand people to apply their fundamental beliefs to make political decisions, splitting Americans into what Hunter identified as “orthodox” and “progressive” camps (2001: 43).
Multiple scholars after Hunter also explored the concept of culture war within American society, a war that would tug at the strings of American ideals for decades. C.Wright Mills depicted the postwar period in America as a “dystopian, bureaucratic iron cage” (Mills, qtd. Hartman, 13) where political, economic, and military actors with too much power were defining America’s national identity. The diverse cultural fabric of America may pose an explanation to its political and cultural polarization, and the individuality of choice in this period, along with the emergence of new social issues, made polarization inevitable (Hetherington & Weiler, 2010). The variables that characterize the modern-day culture wars are multitudinous and progressively interconnected - even more so online in the digital age. And, importantly, the cultural issues at the heart of American political polarity, underlie something much deeper and more profound which constitute the unique identitary fabric of American society. In Age of Fracture, published twenty years after Hunter’s claim, Daniel Rogers interprets the further cultural turmoil of the late 1960s as a result
of identities becoming more fluid and elective (2011: 5). He describes the domains of social thought that had dominated American intellectual life since World War II began to crumble, where one “heard less about society, history and power and more about individuals, contingency, and choice” (2011: 5). The leftist intellectuals during this time were eager to offer a new vision for America, one that would “transcend the rigid conformity of the postwar consensus” (Hartman, 13). This period in American politics can be described as a progressive, liberal pushback against the more conservative intellectual and social axioms post-WWII, and Rodgers portrays this era as a period of consolidation; while the 1970s onwards an era that edged towards disaggregation. The 1960s embodied the successful countercultural shift to the left, where progressive ideas on abortion, censorship, affirmative action, science, feminism among several others (Nagle, 2016: 58) threatened the traditional ideals of conservatism. The public and media spheres were inundated with progressive, left-wing ideas that took center-stage in American politics and cultural life.
Although the long-accepted narrative of the conservative cultural pushback describes a powerful and influential right-leaning media network only emerging in the 1980s, scholars like Nicole Hemmer trace the efforts of the conservative movement in the media to decades prior. Beginning in the 1950s, “activists in media emerged as leaders of the conservative movement” (Hemmer, 2018: 10), playing an important role in the establishment of media enterprises such as radio programs, publishing houses, television shows, paper publications and magazines that bolstered conservative ideologies. These activists founded political organizations, organized rallies and political campaigns, and began to mobilize voters; independence was vital, detaching themselves from other conservatives who represented mainstream media and the perception of conservatism expressed through those outlets. They shared the belief that true political and cultural change originated not only from ideas, but from the “proper expressions and diffusion of those ideas through ideological media sources” (2018: 10). Hemmer explains that the voter base perpetuating the present-day conservatism is in large part a result of the institutionalization and organization of conservative media in the postwar period, where conservative media activists constructed and popularized the idea of liberal media bias (2018)3.
3 In an era where institutional neutrality was considered to be the strength of the American system, conservatives had
the biggest impact in convincing a multitude of American voters on the right that mainstream institutions, especially the media, were all biased in favor of liberalism (Hemmer, 2018).
In her book Messengers of the Right, Hemmer delineates not only the origins of media spreading political ideas from the late 1940s to the 1970s, but also the emergence of a media conflict on what is true and untrue; conservatives media activists promoted an alternative view of the world, one that would challenge the legitimation of objectivity based on their general belief of liberal media bias. Similar to the rhetoric of “fake news” and “alternative facts”4 that sits at the heart of Donald Trump’s presidency and the emergence of an insulated digital right-wing media ecosystem, conservative media activists in this period supplied their following with an alternative method of weighing evidence, through a “different network of authorities, a different conception of fact and accuracy, and a different way of evaluating truth-claims” (2018: 14). Conservative media activists had significant influence on Republican politicians, leading many of them to reject political pragmatism in favor of ideological principles. By challenging objectivity, conservative media transformed a plurality of voters that reinforced the dominance of identity-based media habits and ideological justification within conservative media for decades to come. By the late 1960s, President Nixon initiated a larger scale relationship with conservative media actors, shifting conservatives from only one faction of the Republican party to its core base. Beginning in the 1970s, the conservative media movement that Hemmer traced back to the late 1940s began to accelerate vastly. These messengers of the right augmented the American cultural divide through ideological media, which formed the backbone of “alternative knowledge systems” (Frum, 2012: 14): by giving the public choices on what to read and watch, they could formulate subjective answers to objective political questions on a very wide range of subject matters.
In the 1970s, as liberal principles were injected into mainstream media and culture, activist movements and advocacy groups expanded rapidly, each with their own cultural framework and vision for America. Around this time, William E. Simon, President Nixon’s former secretary of the Treasury, put pressure on conservative intellectual production, urging that the “only thing that can save the Republican Party is a counterintelligentsia” (Rodgers, 2011: 7), thus commencing a project that would funnel funds to social scientists, writers, and journalists whose “ideas had been frozen out of general circulation by the dominant socialist-statist-collectivist orthodoxy prevailing
4 ‘Alternative facts’ is a phrase used by U.S. Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway, and subsequently made
popular among Trump supporters. Just two days after President Trump’s inauguration, Conway defended then White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on a false claim concerning the attendance numbers of Trump’s inauguration as President. The term became pervasive in defending President Trump’s actions, defining ‘alternative facts’ as ‘additional facts and alternative information’(Nuzzi, 2017).
in the universities and media” (2011: 7). An ongoing, back-and-forth culture war, attempting to cement one cultural viewpoint as the dominant fabric of the American utopia. Within a decade, Simon’s project had dramatically reconfigured the production and distribution of conservative ideas: publishing books, funding TV networks and programs, subsidizing student organizations and newspapers, financing conservative talk and radio shows - all with the goal of changing the terms of debate. By supporting corporations, a national network of conservative think tanks efficiently and aggressively proliferated conservative ideas into the media and political debate. Thus, the “conservative idea brokers” (2011: 7) modified the overall landscape of publication, news media, and intellectual argument. Argumentatively structured media, novel journals of scholarly debate, and political think tanks gave way for many new forms of intellectual production and dissemination (2011: 2), and started driving new ideas aggressively in motion.
Media and technology were already then, and increasingly now, a central aspect of the manipulation and polarization of US politics. The media ecosystem's various shifts to political polars of American politics, and progressively in the ecosystem's radical components, has in many ways augmented the polarity's current reality. Following Yochai Benkler’s essential conclusions in Network Propaganda, the deregulation of cable TV in the 1970s, and the revocation of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1980s created the “institutional conditions for divergent organizational strategies to explore the markets for listeners and viewers” (2018: 382). Enhanced distribution bandwidth, first provided by AM radio, then by cable, and eventually the Internet ensured that strategies based on “intense engagement” (2018: 382) of broad but still minority consumer groups would be a feasible business model. Emerging movements which incorporated more radical conservatism, or generally more radical ideas sitting at the fringe of the political spectrum, would prove to be very profitable media markets; markets focused on informing political beliefs and news. The polarity generated by more than forty years of contrasting market dynamics, partisan ideological justification, and differing institutional procedures resulted in truly different ideologies and consumption habits (2018: 384).
In 1992, at the Republican National Convention in Houston, Pat Buchanan cited James Hunter’s book in his famous culture war speech, proclaiming that a cultural war was taking place for the soul of America, criticizing the liberal canons that pushed against conservative and religious values and condemning the Democratic Party as the party that supported radical feminism, abortion, and the gay rights movement (Nagourney,2012). He compared the culture war to the
Cold War, stating that “there is a religious war going on in this country… It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself” (Miller, 1992: 55). The speech situated the culture war at the fore of American politics, but deviated from Hunter’s message considerably. For Hunter, the rhetorical war diffusing in American culture was undesirable and “regrettably divisive” (55), while for Buchanan, it was merely a viable tool setting the stage for hyper-partisan spheres to emerge, distributed by partisan media channels.
In this particular context, then, the propagation and development of certain ideologies is deeply rooted in the way that media is presented to us - following Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” and the notion of media ecology. By providing many historic contributions to media studies, McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message” to determine that the communication medium used to relay a message is almost as important, if not more important than the message itself (McLuhan, 7). The message signifies both content and character. For McLuhan, it is naive to let the content of the message blind you to the character of the message, where the character of the message is overlooked or discarded. The medium, by shaping and managing the size, form of human action and interrelation with it, is ultimately as consequential as the message; and what actions the message produces (9). While individuals tend to focus on the obvious, they miss the structural changes in human society that are injected subtly over time. He suggested that media intrinsically affect the development of society, and noted the exceptional periods of growth characterized by the advancement of a new technology during said periods. If the media ecosystem is inherently and growingly divided, the communication mediums through which society constructs their reality are disproportionately adversarial and over time, promote division.
McLuhan’s proposed theoretical concept of media ecology was elaborated on afterwards by Neil Postman, who drew a notable interconnection between biology and media. In biology, a medium is identified as a substance through which a culture grows - in media ecology, the medium is a technology through which human culture develops, influencing its ideologies, politics, cultural traits and social organization (Postman, 2000). While “medium” had previously been understood as a means of transport for communication, scholars such as McLuhan and Postman pioneered the theories in communication studies that establish the “medium” as an environment. By placing an emphasis on media as environments with a deep focus on their effects, development, and form, media ecology concerns the intricate intertwine between humans, media, technology, and the
environment they interact in. Postman stressed the importance of recognizing that humans live in two distinct environments. One is natural -- “air, trees, rivers, and caterpillars” (2000: 11) -- while the other is the media environment, consisting of images, symbols and technology that make humans what they are. Media ecology is essential in the context of this thesis, because it relates the integration, interdependence, and dynamics in media environments to the effects of media and technology in human affairs; it suggests that the technology and structures we use to communicate, think, and form opinions with play a crucial role in how society creates and understands reality. As thinking processes, social and political structures, and conceptions of reality are ever so ingrained in our symbols and media, it is critical to focus on the relationship between diverse media, not only a single, specific medium. This complex relationship is what makes up a society’s media ecosystem.
Returning to the notion of ideological dualism in American media and politics, Hunter emphasizes that the deep polarization of American public discourse is “intensified by and institutionalized through the very media by which that discussion takes place” (Hunter, 2001: 160), and it is through these media that opinions “acquire a life of their own” (2001: 160). The integration of new technology and media platforms in daily life only perpetuates culture wars through a partisan media environment and conflicted cultural frameworks. The niche markets which enabled the development of radical ideas in US media emphasized content, without assessing the structural changes that the messages (content) actively stimulated. This notion, combined with the quantity of current polarizing media content, partly explains the unprecedented crevice in America’s media ecology and its effect on culture, politics, and more radical ideologies. Through this extensive change in structure, the superstructures of ‘postmodern’ culture molded to fit diverse narratives, a media culture war emerged. Although it developed for decades before digital platforms, it was only exacerbated by the shift to digital and online.
Online Culture Wars
In her book Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right, Angela Nagle argues that the online culture wars are a perpetuation and an acceleration of the culture wars of the 1960s-90s, despite their essential differences. In the culture wars predating the Internet, more conservative, older age groups were seen to fight against a new wave of overt liberalism and cultural secularization instilled in the younger generations’ mindsets (Nagle, 2017:
7). This liberal mindset was a major contributor to the culture wars that over time transformed America’s cultural fabric. The shift to the Internet as a major infrastructure in daily life brought the emergence of a wide range of digital platforms, each with their own set of affordances that determine the functionality of a specific platform and in turn, their users’ relationship with it. Originally evolving from the field of ecological psychology, James Gibson coined the term affordance as a relational concept that is “equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior” (1986: 129), referring to all actionable possibilities that are dependent on a users’ physical capabilities; abstractly defining an “invariant combination of variables” (1986: 134) which establish the various actions possible given an object’s or environment’s characteristics. The further work of William Gaver in design studies explored affordances in the context of human-computer interaction (HCI), where he argued that affordances are “properties of the world defined with respect to people's interaction with it” (1991: 80). His research indicated that most social activities are embedded in, and also shaped by the material environment, cementing the notion of social affordances as “the possibilities that technological changes afford social relations and social structure” (Hsieh, 2012). In the context of new media, Bucher and Helmond describe the concept of affordance as “ what material artifacts such as media technologies allow people to do” (2018: 3), where a technological object will afford “different actions for specific users” (Tuters et al., 2018) by interacting differently depending on the end user5. Properly framing the ways in which technology affords sociality is imperative in the context of this thesis, because although technological affordances do not alter the messages directly, in digital platforms they act by defining the possible range of messages. Through the design of digital platforms, the affordances of these platforms subsequently shape the digital environment that the user inhabits and interacts with; complete control of the interface’s allowances and constraints steers users towards specific behavior. Cultural change may occur through the unique affordances of specific platforms as users create habits within the platforms they use, and platforms’ interfaces may foster different practices which develop through time.
Many cultural issues that were prevalent in the 1960s-era culture tensions are still significant topics of discussion, as the online culture wars raging through Internet culture and
5 For example, an e-commerce platform may act, look, and be used diversely by the user buying a product, the
developers who manage and control the software, and industry regulators which supervise the digital supply chain of the products.
subcultures focus on reiterated issues of feminism, sexuality, racism, gender identity, freedom of speech, censorship, and political correctness. The formation of niche subcultures online, reinforced through unique affordances of digital platforms such as anonymity or pseudo-anonymity, enabled the mobilization of an extremely diverse demographic consisting of “teenage gamers, pseudonymous swastika-posting anime lovers, anti-feminist pranksters, nerdish harassers and meme-making trolls” (7) whose transgressive nature and grim humor made it hard to identify whether certain political or cultural views were genuine or simply for the initiation of hostile, antagonistic discussion and the lulz6.
Poe’s Law, the result of a philosophical concept on Internet culture formed by Nathan Poe, states that without a concise indicator of an author’s objective, the parody or irony component of a extremist statement may be indistinguishable from sincere extremism in online spaces - even more so if these online spaces thrive on anonymity or pseudo-anonymity (spaces such as 4chan or Reddit). In other words, it is nearly impossible to tell who is joking online and who is expressing sincere beliefs. With close attention to anonymous discussion boards like 4chan or pseudo-anonymous personalities on YouTube, Poe’s Law explains the prevalent toxic irony of online subcultures; the identity play which continues to blur the lines between reality and the imaginary is an obstacle to understanding individuals’ sincere beliefs online. In a digital complex where identity can be easily obscured or invented, Poe’s Law highlights the complexity of determining true beliefs on digital platforms. If ideologies are formed based on irony and jokes, but taken seriously by a cohort of devout followers, can destructive irony itself evolve into political or cultural movements?
One of Angela Nagle’s most conclusive points is that the rise of Internet subcultures which are actively reshaping politics and cultural drivers cemented the collapse of mass culture sensibility, or in other words, the remaining bits of mainstream sense of culture within the public. One of the victories of Trump supporters was ultimately the victory in the war against mainstream media, leading to the extensive emergence of anti-establishment, anti-mainstream feelings that are expressed through a “DIY culture of memes and user-generated content” (2017: 7) that defines a
6 The lulz can be described as an amusing but often hostile brand of humor etymologically derived from “lol”, and
was typically used by anons on 4chan, along with members of the Anonymous movement, from the desire to unleash a flood of amusing and terrifying mischief (Coleman, 2014). It captures the dark, deviant style of humor popularized by Anonymous and typical of 4chan-style trolling culture. In other words, lulz can be seen as an evil laugh at someone else’s expense; the bigger the reaction provoked, the bigger the lulz.
newly-politicized generation of voters. Both the left and the right have become “increasingly unmoored to any cultural mainstream” (2017: 12), leaving an unoccupied void in which this new generation of voters could form new political ideas that are non-conformist to either left-wing or right-wing traditional beliefs. As old media continues its decline, the gatekeepers of former cultural sensibilities have been almost exhaustively reconfigured on both sides of the political spectrum. They have been replaced and outpaced by viral content online from fringe, obscure sources and the “culture industry consumers” (2017: 8) have been substituted with instant content producers. The use of social media and digital platforms in American election cycles changed dramatically; social media platforms and their influence evolved at a very fast pace, creating stark differences in the use, or most recently the weaponization, of digital media for political elections and political ideas.
Around the same time as the candidacy of Donald Trump in 2015, Richard Spencer coined the term ‘alt-right’, a term describing an assortment of extreme far-right movements characterized by a dismissal of traditional Christian conservatism and approval of white nationalism and supremacism. 4chan and its associated trolling culture, fused with the emergent ‘alt-right’ movement online, and later diffused to the dominant digital platforms of the present7. Through the process identified as normiefication, radical political and cultural ideologies disperse from peripheral corners of the Web to prevailing digital platforms. Normiefication is defined as a “process of normalization where content from subcultural online communities, namely 4chan and 8chan, travels to and is popularized on mainstream platforms such as YouTube or Twitter, and reported on by traditional broadcast media like CNN or Fox News” (Hagen et al., 2019). Through examining the movement of conspiracy theories or misinformation from their inception on platforms like 4chan to mainstream news media, normiefication refers to the cross-platform movement of subcultural ideas or concepts through interconnected layers of digital ecosystems from the outskirts to the center8. It conceptualizes the Web as composed of interrelated layers with “distinct digital infrastructures, materialities, media practices, and socio-cultural norms” (2019). As fringe movements move closer to the center of debate, their marginal role quickly becomes obsolete, for they are becoming influencers of the mainstream. The subsequent normalization of
7 Refer to Appendix VI for additional theoretical framework on 4chan’s interface and influence within the digital
ecosystem.
8 Refer to Appendix X for additional theoretical framework on the process of normiefication and its consequences on
fringe conspiracy theories and fringe ideas through their diffusion into the mainstream media, providing them with oxygen and visibility, is a significant motive to understand normiefication’s effects in most recent conspiratorial occurrences. Researchers at the Open Intelligence Lab9 have conducted several research projects regarding the creation of conspiracy theories on 4chan and their diffusion, and found that conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate10 and QAnon quickly became well known outside of the 4chan environment. The conspiracy theories spread to ‘bridge’ platforms like YouTube11 and Reddit12, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and online news such as Breitbart before extending to most conventional news platforms. Following Tokmetzis’ conclusions13 on YouTube recommendations, YouTube has become the new “mothership of online hate” (Tokmetzis, 2019), dominating websites and forums like 4chan and 8chan in size and public influence and participatory culture14. Both ends of the political spectrum have capitalized on the ubiquity, visibility and shareability that YouTube’s design provides. A variety of scholars, media experts, and Internet celebrities are utilizing YouTube to “promote a range of political positions, from mainstream versions of libertarianism and conservatism, all the way to overt white nationalism” (Lewis, 2018), playing into a larger phenomenon where YouTube personalities aim to influence young audiences by broadcasting far-right ideologies in the form of “news and entertainment” (2018: 3).
Dale Beran explains how fringe online subcultures, their migration to dominant platforms like YouTube and Twitter, and the alt-right had constructed a “skeleton key” (2017: 1) to Trump’s victory in 2016, and explained that increasingly so, “offensive terms and imagery associated with the alt-right movement surfaced in the mainstream throughout the election cycle” (2017: 2). Furthermore, it has become quite apparent how a platform culture like 4chan has taken “advantage of the media ecosystem architecture to insert the narratives, memes, and frames into the network
9 The Open Intelligence Lab, or OILab, is a collective of professors and researchers based in Amsterdam. Their work
and empirical research focus on subcultural milieus online and online political subcultures on lesser-known corners of the Web.
10 The Pizzagate conspiracy initiated when users of the 4chan /pol/ board began investigating the leaked emails of
John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman in 2016. Through the emails, they forged a narrative that Clinton and other liberal elites ran an obscure child molestation and trafficking ring from the basement of a pizza restaurant in Washington, DC. This conspiracy theory collides with the death of Jeffrey Epstein’ conspiracy in 2019.
11 Refer to Appendix IV for theoretical framework on YouTube as a “bridge platform”. 12 Refer to Appendix V for theoretical framework on Reddit as a “bridge platform”. 13 Refer to Tokmetzis’ study on YouTube recommendations in the Works Cited section.
14 Henry Jenkins coined the term participatory culture, describing how online platforms and software empower and
encourage creative expression, participation in online discussion alongside online sharing with other individuals so it can be valued (2009).
directly through the major propagation outlets” (Benkler et al., 2018: 225). It wasn’t so much that 4chan trolls, shitposters, extremists, and alt-right influencers like Milo Yiannopoulos had won Trump, and more broadly the radical right the 2016 election; they had won over the media and by extension, American society, culture, and media landscapes. Strategically, they mobilized a movement almost solely based on influencing culture and politics primarily through media. Although the alt-right’s ideas were not particularly new, the new element of its swift development was the process in which their ideas came to be “entangled with the abstract dynamics of Internet memes and subcultural practices of Internet trolls” (Tuters and Hagen, 2019).
The alt-right’s ideas rise to the mainstream were closely linked with Trump’s media war and eventual election, and the intensification of online culture wars in America is a major contributor to the misinformation complex we currently witness in America’s media ecosystem. A movement that incorporates “fascistic, racist, nationalistic, populist, anti-feminist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, anti-immigration, anti-Islamic and protectionist beliefs” (Hepper et al., 2019: 206) as well as attracting related movements, including “conspiracy-theorism, free speech libertarians, palaeoconservatism, neoreactionism, and an increasingly right-wing internet culture” (206), the alt-right stemmed from 4chan, chan culture and Reddit. These movements, bolstered by a powerful emergence of alt-right sentiments online, are also a product of an “increasingly entrenched conspiracy industry” (Neiwert, 32) that generate conspiracy theories concerning the real truth behind public narratives constructed by, and in, the mainstream media. According to Happer et al, Gamergate15 represented the first significant public, cross-platform indication of 4chan’s new alt-right sentiments. After Gamergate, chan culture seeped through to other platforms like 8chan16, Reddit, and YouTube, and Twitter among others, where it formed a “new alternative (and alt-right influenced) media for many younger people” (2019: 206). Gamergate formed an alliance of gamers, anti-feminists, right-wing chan culture, followers of the radical right and extremist ideologies. This alliance edged much closer to mainstream discussion and public debate,
15 Gamergate was a hashtag movement in 2014 that began on 4chan and spread through mainstream media, initiated
by individuals who claimed to be frustrated by a supposedly noticeable lack of ethics within gaming journalism. It quickly evolved into a movement of systemic harassment of female (and minority) game developers, journalists, and critics. The original target of the campaign was Zoe Quinn. Gamergate was a characterization of a perpetual alt-right backlash against women, their use of technology and contribution to public life. The movement turned into an organized, misogynistic hate campaign that put 4chan in the spotlight in the formation of anti-establishment and politically incorrect movements (Nagle).
politicizing a large number of young individuals, mostly men, who were devoted in organizing strategies and arguments to wage an online war against the cultural left (Nagle, 2017).
By 2016, it became clear that the strategies used by individuals involved with Gamergate were also being used extensively by the alt-right, who constructed a fictional establishment that they could wage a cultural war against as underdogs through the digital media ecosystem. Three main elements are identified by Happer et al. which represent this establishment: mainstream, liberal news media and their biases, the mainstream political order and Washington’s deep state run and led by liberal elites, and a multicultural culture focused on political correctness. The alt-right believes that these factors discriminated against whites by catering to minorities, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and ‘Feminazis’ (Happer et al. 207). By creating a “multi-layered alternative online media empire” (Nagle, 45) consisting of openly white supremacist websites, populist right-wing media outlets, conspiracy theorists, 4chan culture, shitposting17, and Reddit, the alt-right mobilized an online media ecosystem that magnified and significantly inflamed the culture wars that for several decades tore at the foundations of American society, dividing any centrist aspect of the political spectrum to polar extremes. Chan culture, 4chan and 8chan, and Reddit are, in particular, some of the most substantial factors in the alt-right media ecology: they catered to an increasingly imperative youth demographic. This demographic played a crucial role in the various attacks on mainstream media, politics, the idea of political correctness, leftist political attitudes, and the agility in co-opting and weaponizing troll culture and memetic content. Richard Spencer himself delineates the power of memes and their unique attributes of communicating something, often an ideology or concept, immediately and explicitly.
The alt-right has become a fully integrated part of the American media ecology by establishing itself predominantly in its cultural agility, its “ability to stay at the forefront of events, themes, ideas, and names in the media by adapting them to their own uses” (Neiwert, 183), remixing content into memes and other Internet vernaculars, injecting it into the mainstream media ecosystem until it becomes part of the new normal. In the online culture wars, the alt-right has been recognized for widely weaponizing memes and image-based content as a means of supposedly countering the status quo of liberal political correctness in mainstream politics. The
17 Shitposting refers to a form of inciting provocation on the Internet, and a method used to derail a discussion or
create confusion within a conversation on the Web. Usually it attempts to aggravate a situation or conversation for those involved (Biggs, 2016).
online culture war was in many ways reinforced and further triggered by the emergence of radical right movements online; their values of trolling, internet pranks and antagonistic memes amounted to not only distractions or ironic digressions, but as key elements of political action (Wendling, 2018). 4chan’s ties to the “older internet” and its unique characteristics of anonymity and ephemerality afford its anonymous users a creative, unregulated hive that results in an overtly-libertarian form of free speech (2018). Despite emerging as a movement that, in many ways, is seen as having substantially realigned US politics and media ecosystems, the alt-right as a label has become “accommodatingly imprecise” (Marwick and Lewis, 2017: 11). On one end, it represents the trolling culture that despise establishment politics found on /pol/ and /b/18, welcomes the use of toxic irony and in-group jokes, and weaponizes extreme speech to inflame others. On the opposite end, it personifies a loosely connected assemblage of “blogs, forums, podcasts, and Twitter personalities” (2017: 11) unified in their animosity towards feminism, liberalism and multiculturalism. This division caused by diverse beliefs of the different groups leads to internal disputes, giving the movement incoherence which is a unique factor in both its amplification and its incongruity. A major observation by Marwick and Lewis’ research recognizes that although alt-right media celebrities such as Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopolous are in no case accepted by everyone on the right, and that a large number of those on the right condemn the advocacy for anti-Semitism, white supremacism, and neo-Nazism employed by alt-right outlets like The Daily Stormer19, ambiguity is a strong and effectual strategy; it enables those who disassociate and
detach themselves from certain elements of alt-right dogmas to still actively promote the alt-right itself.
Substantially, the rampant online culture war does not just take inspiration from Buchanan’s war of the 1990s. Its anti-establishment angles harken back to the counterculture of the 1960s counterculture movement. By attacking and fighting back, in their framework, the dominant ‘politically correct’ neoliberal culture, the current internet alt-right, characterized by Milo Yiannopoulos, internet trolls, toxic irony, memetic antagonism, political incorrectness,
18 The /b/ board, or “random” bin, is one of 4chan’s most trafficked boards, and the most popular destination for
trolling and shitposting (Beran, 2017). It carries over 40% of 4chan’s traffic.
19 The Daily Stormer is an American far right neo-Nazi website, news outlet, and comment board founded by Andrew
Anglin in 2013. It is named after Der Stürmer, a newspaper published by Julius Streicher, a Nazi executed for crimes against humanity in Nuremberg, 1946 (Showalter). It is at the extremist end of radical, racist and xenophobic wing of the alt-right, showing how extremists have latched on to the alt-right and shaped new portrayals of the movement online (Wendling).
Breitbart, anti-morality, and anti-egalitarianism position themselves as the new counterculture. Their actions can be seen in a similar culture and motivation as the original counterculture: non-conformism. Digital platforms, then, enable these tensions to intensify and the non-conformism to take new forms of “transgression and irreverence for its own sake” (Nagle, 2017: 60), outstripping its ideological basis. It is for this very reason that Nagle characterizes this not as “evidence for the return of conservatism, but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism” (2017: 59-60). This focus on transgression and irreverence is explicitly in conflict with the old conservatism of Buchanan’s culture war, and the new right is distinctly unconservative. Through a certain lens, the alt-right can be seen as the Internet era’s new punk movement in their repurposing of old, controversial imagery and tactics. Through this contradiction, the alt-right can be hard to pin down as being either right or left. It is difficult to decipher its real position as old canons of traditional political values are increasingly shedding and disintegrating. The new right’s transgression transcends these politics and is all-important, as Nagle writes: “an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id, whether they’re on the left or the right” (2017: 60).
This shift in dominant culture and platform affordances may help explain the intensity and extreme character of the new culture war. The updated hyper-partisan, polarized media ecosystem enables these new “culture warriors” a level of irreverence and embraces a postmodern framework which was previously untenable. As the Web evolved into the predominant medium for fast and copious acquisition of information, it has also become a medium where an abundance of misinformation, weaponized content and hateful rhetoric is propagated through various digital platforms (Zannetou, 2019). These different rhetorical implementations then, reconfigure political ideologies and begin to replace traditional political canons. In the context of media polarization, understanding the deep intricacies and complex entanglements of cultural wars is paramount to understanding just how divided the American media ecosystem has become - and how it perpetuates the cultural division manifested through its close interconnection with media, media usage, and media integration.
Post-truth
In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, awareness of the impact of right-wing nationalist and populist fringe movements in national discourse intensified considerably. On the
fringe right, the attack on truth and reason which starkly manifested itself during the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency had been brooding and catalyzing for decades. For scholars, the threat to democracy that was occurring was consequential, and technology was being discerned as the major disruptor in this reorganization of political and cultural movements. The confluence of social media, bots, algorithmic bias, news curation, and big data analysis produced echo chambers20 which decreased trust and confidence in institutions, enhanced biases, and ultimately reduced the ability to make sense of global occurrences (Benkler et al., 2018). With online media as a primary source of information for an ever-increasing proportion of the population, individuals have been steered towards being locked into “ideological filter bubbles that lacked cross-cutting information” (Groshek and Koc-Michalska, 2017). With increasing dependence on online platforms to shape perspectives on national and international occurrences, tendencies for suppositions to replace facts, and conspiracy theories to replace concrete realities have greatly intensified (Neiwert, 2017).
A large study conducted by Yochai Benkler and other scholars analyzed over 1.25 million news stories published online between April 1, 2015 and November 8, 2016 discovered development of a right-wing media network, centered around Breitbart21 which initiated the growth of a “distinct and insulated media system” (Benkler et al., 2017), exploiting social media as a “backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world” (2017: 1). In their analysis22, Benkler et al identify that central features of right-wing media were attacks on the ethics, credibility, and professionalism of opposing media outlets. The emergence of the term “fake news” related more to disinformation rather than fully fabricated articles or reports, giving way for the “purposeful construction of true or partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core, misleading” (Benkler et al., 2017: 1). A conclusion stressed in the research is that “fake news” or echo chambers are not adequate expressions to encapsulate a key alteration of the media ecosystem during this time, but the consequences of an increasingly polarized media ecosystem is the significant transformation taking place. The network compromising of reciprocally-reinforcing hyper-partisan news outlets edge on reinvigorating Richard Hofstadter’s notion of the “paranoid
20 Refer to Appendix VIII for additional theoretical framing of echo chambers and filter bubbles in the augmentation
of pre-existing biases.
21 Breitbart News is an American far-right website with a focus on right-wing news, opinion, and commentary. It was
founded in 2007 by Andrew Breitbart. Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former Chief Strategist, was a founding member of Breitbart, and following the death of Andrew Breitbart, he took over as executive chairman. After Bannon took control, Breitbart incorporated a more nationalistic, alt-right agenda.
22 Refer to Appendix IX for additional theoretical analysis of Benkler et al’s research study and the repercussions
style in American politics” in his classic 1964 essay. Hofstadter, a historian, argued that the paranoid style is characterized by senses of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” (1996: 3), suggesting that this paranoia is more impressionable with the way in which ideas are believed, rather than with the truth or falseness of their content. His work discerns the connection between politics and society as a beginning and ending point in the psychology of American political rhetoric, a paranoid state of mind that catalyzes the formation of post-truth subconsciousness and conspiracy theories as an indicator and result of ideological paranoia. Hofstadter believed there was a great amount of political leverage to be extracted from the “animosities and passions of a small minority” (2019), the fear of losing control on traditional conservative values can symbolize right-wing political and cultural paranoia manifested through its media by attacking opposing cultural ideals.
After the 2016 election, extremist views alongside the “embrace of conspiracy thinking and misinformation went mainstream” (Makutani, 2018: 16); the concept of post-truth became prevalent in public debate after it was named the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year in November 2016 (McIntyre, 2018), defining it as the “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (D’Ancona, 2017: 11). Historian and professor Yuval Noah Harari stresses that although fake news and falsehoods have recently permeated the digital ecosystem, they are in fact not very new at all (Harari, 2018); in Harari’s view the post-truth phenomenon characterizes homo sapiens, or the human species, as our most powerful idiosyncrasy is our ability to generate, fabricate stories and consequently believe them; tales, religions, and doctrines “which enable the cooperation and ties between complete strangers” (Brahms, 2020: 3), leading humankind to favor power instead of truth. According to Harari, then, what perpetuates the phenomenon of post-truth in the digital ecosystem is technology itself, enabling the adjustment of propaganda on an individual basis, using individuals’ weaknesses and habits to fabricate narratives consistent with those individuals’ pre-existing biases (Harari, 2018). In the post-truth era, emotions overshadow rational thinking and skepticism jeopardizes the facts unveiled by science, simultaneously being aggravated by unverifiable information floating through dominant digital platforms. This era of distrust and self-segregation is exacerbated by the increasing normality of hate groups, Internet trolls, social media political influencers, populist politics and figures, hyper-partisan news outlets, and conspiracy theorists (Marwick and Lewis, 2017).
As discussed previously, the stark ideological divide within politics, culture, and the media apparatus in the United States has always been present, and has constantly been accelerating as cultural frameworks embedded in culture are portrayed through vastly different media environments. The diminishing role of rational discourse, common sense and fact-based policies have paved the way for the erosion of democratic institutions such as the free press, the vilification of established media outlets, as well as the growth of alternative knowledge-producing platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Telegram, and Facebook among others. The accumulation of falsehoods, alternative narratives, assaults on truth and an extensive overhaul of the systems through which we receive news are just a few elements of the digital post-truth era. Post-truth characterizes the deep and crucial alterations to the knowledge-producing institutions of democracy, and amounts to a “form of ideological supremacy, whereby its practitioners are trying to compel someone to believe in something whether there is good evidence for it or not” (McIntyre, 2018: 12). The notion that feelings and opinions may matter more than facts is destructive to the authority and influence over public opinion by established evidence, and the power of fake news embolden the purposes of profit or control by deliberately trying to instigate reactions towards misinformation (2018).
A newly emerged, insulated right-wing media ecosystem “may be understood as an important driver towards a post-truth world” (Benkler et al., 2018; Tuters et al., 2018), where the essence of truth has been eclipsed, and therefore it has been made irrelevant. Such a stark structural change, characterized by a global nexus of polarizing media ecologies, is at odds with social and political arrangements of the past. The conventional hierarchy of authority and knowledge that lent itself to institutions and representative entities constructed a framework in which truth was a vital part of the system; evidence-based facts would, for the most part, control the untruthful intent to transgress transparency. In the post-truth era, this past structure is being redefined through networks that are not institutional but rather viral, through social media, cyberspace, and digital ecosystems which challenge truth-seeking structures like the traditional free press and mainstream news media. The surge of misinformation enables people to individualize their news sources that confirm their pre-existing, prevailing biases (Bartlett, 2018), stimulating conspiracism as a viable alternative for constructing new narratives to explain global or national events. In a most recent study by Yael Brahms through the Institute for National Security Studies on the philosophy of post-truth, Brahms identifies four distinguished characteristics of the post-truth phenomenon.
Disruptive, advancing technology and an undulation of information are foremost; the diminishing trust in crucial institutions and an erosion of faith in discovered and proven facts; postmodernist ideologies, which in her view infiltrated the fields of science and national security and consequently provided the foundations for decreased emphasis on truth; and the political conflict over the requirements or conditions for truth (Brahms, 2020). An interconnection of these characteristics and occurrences over time have evolved the condition of post-truth from a phenomenon to a concrete reality, increasing the polarized media ecosystem to the brink of irreversible imbalance.
