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I think culturally we've accepted that political propaganda is different from run-of-the-mill corporate advertisement. Even the words we use are different: few

I think culturally we've accepted that political propaganda is different from run-of-the-mill corporate advertisement. Even the words we use are different: few people would call a TV spot "propaganda", even though both seek to influence people to act in a certain way. People understand and accept the concept and execution of advertisement. Propaganda is not received in the same way.

RpFLCL 9y ago
Interesting point. I think you're probably right. There's a different emotional impact between being manipulated to consume versus being manipulated in what you think. Of course at the end of the day it's exploiting a similar vulnerability in our wetware.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  Also, when that propaganda is full of invented racist conspiracy theories and defamatory lies about the opposition, it starts getting pretty ethically gross. If the propaganda was fundamentally truthful and respectful (e.g. sharing additional accurate factual analysis that people just didn’t know about), it wouldn’t have quite the same odious smell. There’s not that much distance between some of the ads and fake news stories flashed in front of people before the election and e.g. ISIS recruiting materials or Nazi propaganda from the 1930s.
Zarath 9y ago
I personally call it "brainwash", as "propaganda" tends to have political connotations (which I think may be a reason you don't see it associated with typical advertising).
opportune 9y ago
There's also the fact that political propaganda comes in a lot more veiled forms than corporate propaganda. Because it's in a sense natural for us to discuss politics face to face, or at least we recognize that some level of discussion about politics is necessary and good, we're mostly ok with things like celebrities endorsing a candidate. A candidate traveling around the country and speaking to potential voters is pretty much fine. A single person expressing their views honestly isn't really guilty of "propaganda". The problem is when huge amounts of money get mixed up in it. In the US money doesn't buy you political power directly, but it does buy you a voice (in the form of advertisements using mass media). It's still up to the listeners to listen to your voice one way or the other, but the disproportionate loudness of people's voices ensures that arguments backed by money are supported much louder than those without money (this is the thesis of Manufactured Consent). Ok, this is less than ideal, but things probably aren't skewed that much regarding things like social issues. Political advertisement, in my opinion, doesn't veer into the realm of propaganda until one of two things happen: either the source is dishonest about their intentions (e.g. a person fully aware of climate change publicly denying it for financial reasons) and true beliefs, or their arguments are veiled in a way such that they do not appear to be advertisement at all. For example, suppose out of 100 homicides in the US, 10 were committed by Green people against Purple people, but a news organization decides to cover 5 homicides this week, and focuses solely on the ones between green and purple people. That doesn't look like an ad, even though it is one. The problem is that there's big money in this type of propaganda; these days political power is all about controlling narratives. It allows for a type of "inception" of beliefs and values - for example, making Green people think they're on the bring of a race war with Purple people - by letting people come to conclusions themselves after being presented by a highly slanted distribution of input. This type of belief-inception is precisely what Cambridge Analytica specialized in. By knowing demographic information, they could target individuals based on issues they knew they would be sensitive to, and slowly indoctrinate them with desired views. I'll use my race example again, because Robert Mercer is essentially an unapologetic racist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mercer_(businessman)#Race_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mercer_(businessman)#Ra.... You start by painting a narrative picture, highlighting race-related conflicts and painting a picture of deteriorating race relations. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, this stokes racial tensions, creating more incidents for you to curate. By misrepresenting the relative frequency of these types of occurrences, people gradually come to the conclusion that you want them to: in this case, that black people are becoming more racist towards white people. You can use this to bring over working-class white people to the Republicans. Another good example of this type of indoctrination was Gamergate (which essentially birthed Breitbart / the alt-right) being used to galvanize frustration with the social justice sphere into creating a community of young male "race-realists"
- mhneu 9y ago
  I agree the problem is money, and I also agree that bad faith and disinformation are true measures of problematic political communication. A principle we could rely on is openness. Just disclose who is paying for what. And disclose the ads. If Trump/CA/Russia targeted an ad at you distorting HRC's record, we should know who paid for it. Up until now, political ads - TV, billboards, even direct mail - were discoverable to the American public, so big distortions could be called out (even if they sometimes were not, as with GWB's racist attacks in SC on McCain's adopted kid.) But the current setup, where Facebook ads are effectively secret, is a big big problem. How do we know the ads were all honest? Let's just have FB release the 2016 ads so we America has time to figure out what to do before 2018.
  - opportune 9y ago
    I agree with you in principle, but I'm not sure how feasible this given that I literally can't think of how to implement it. Political advocacy groups use complex hierarchies of shell companies and revolving payments to get money from super-donors into advertising. FB can't just release an invoice saying something like (Payment: 106,000; Sender: Robert Mercer) or "paid for by the Russian Federation". It would say things like "paid for by the Committee to Improve America", which receives money from the Pro-Families Committee, funded by the Traditionalists Group, an advocacy arm of the Peers Think Tank, which has ~100s of wealthy donors.
    - mhneu 9y ago
      It's very feasible, and even easy. You require disclosure of beneficial ownership of shell corps. That's already being done in some real estate markets to prevent money laundering: http://www.capdale.com/treasury-issues-final-regulations-to-address-use-of-us-llcs-to-disguise-beneficial-ownership http://www.capdale.com/treasury-issues-final-regulations-to-... Then we require that all money spent on politics (AND related political influencing, like money to Jud Watch and Cit U and Cato and AEI and Bradley Fdn and Am First and Koch Found and Americans for "Prosp" and the NRA) requires public disclosure of who's behind it. We already do much of this for direct campaign donations and in real estate. It's just a matter of political will. And one side has spent 4 decades and hundreds of billions on creating this money-first system, so they are very invested in not changing it. If you care, the first thing to do is get Congress to pass a law rescinding most of Cit U decision.
ekianjo 9y ago
> Propaganda is not received in the same way. Nothing new here, seriously. Propaganda from both sides before elections has existed for as long as there were political debates and political campaigns. The fact that we have now systems to make Propaganda more targeted may make it more effective than before, but that's all. In the end, believing or not in Propaganda is the individual's responsibility.
- opportune 9y ago
  I highly disagree. It's easier to simply disallow veiled political advertisements (propaganda) for both platforms and propagandists. Nobody has a "right" to spread propaganda, just like nobody has a right to defraud people simply because they aren't able to spot a scam
  - swebs 9y ago
    >Nobody has a "right" to spread propaganda It's literally the first amendment.
    - opportune 9y ago
      There's a difference between me telling you my opinion on an issue and me knowingly spreading false information at a mass scale for personal gain. I think that specifically (in my layman's interpretation of law) does not fall under the first amendment's interpretation of allowing freedom of expression since the expression is not genuine, in the same way that fraud is not genuine. You would not be prosecuted for fraud for unwittingly spreading false information, but you would be for doing so wittingly and with incentive for making money
      - vtrenrn31 9y ago
        Why are you assuming that the information spread is false? Propaganda is not necessarily false, in fact, it is better if it is true. Platforms like Facebook would be well within their rights to try and prevent politically targeted advertising, even if it would be a fool's errand. Outlawing it would be unconstitutional. If they try to prevent "spreading of false information" by political advertisers I've no doubt they will simply be harsher on the propagandists who have a political aim at odds with Facebook's interests, one of which is stopping these hit pieces by those angry that Trump won. Nobody would be talking about this if Cambridge Analytica worked with Hillary. They simply want to stop their opponents from using the useful tool that is targeted advertising.
rdtsc 9y ago
> I think culturally we've accepted that political propaganda is different from run-of-the-mill corporate advertisement I think we want to believe that but hasn't been true for many years. Presidents sell a brand unfortunately, just like large companies do their commercials. With the same psychological and rhetorical tricks. One of my favorite examples I always bring up is this: http://adage.com/article/moy-2008/obama-wins-ad-age-s-marketer-year/131810/ http://adage.com/article/moy-2008/obama-wins-ad-age-s-market... notice how with much fanfare everyone was happily handing his campaign the marketing award. Normally that is not awarded to political candidates, it goes to Coke, Pepsi, Apple etc. --- "I honestly look at [Obama's] campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers," said Angus Macaulay, VP-Rodale marketing solutions "To see what he's done, to be able to create a social network and do it in a way where it's created the tools to let people get engaged very easily. It's very easy for people to participate." --- Social network they say? They couldn't mean using Facebook,could they? But, I think they are. An unsurprisingly Obama's campaign used the same methods as CA did: https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/business/economy/facebooks-rules-for-accessing-user-data-lured-more-than-just-cambridge-analytica/2018/03/19/31f6979c-658e-43d6-a71f-afdd8bf1308b_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/business/economy/face... --- Any time people used Facebook’s log-in button to sign on to the campaign’s website, the Obama data scientists were able to access their profile as well as their friends’ information. That allowed them to chart the closeness of people’s relationships and make estimates about which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote. --- > Propaganda is not received in the same way. That's exactly why it is disguised not to be perceived as blatant propaganda. It works best when it is sneaking its way in via a seemingly unbiased publication, or news story, a comedy skit etc
- mistermann 9y ago
  The vast majority of people, and that includes HNers, don't think of that as propaganda. Well, if it was done by a Republican maybe you'd get somewhat better uptake, but I'm getting the feeling the American mind is highly resistant to any suggestion that things aren't as they're told they are. America is the Greatest Country of All Time, after all. It's starting to get very difficult to maintain this level of ignorance but most people are fighting the good fight, at least those who are even paying attention at all.

RpFLCL 9y ago

Interesting point. I think you're probably right. There's a different emotional impact between being manipulated to consume versus being manipulated in what you think. Of course at the end of the day it's exploiting a similar vulnerability in our wetware.

jacobolus 9y ago
Also, when that propaganda is full of invented racist conspiracy theories and defamatory lies about the opposition, it starts getting pretty ethically gross. If the propaganda was fundamentally truthful and respectful (e.g. sharing additional accurate factual analysis that people just didn’t know about), it wouldn’t have quite the same odious smell. There’s not that much distance between some of the ads and fake news stories flashed in front of people before the election and e.g. ISIS recruiting materials or Nazi propaganda from the 1930s.

Zarath 9y ago

I personally call it "brainwash", as "propaganda" tends to have political connotations (which I think may be a reason you don't see it associated with typical advertising).

opportune 9y ago

There's also the fact that political propaganda comes in a lot more veiled forms than corporate propaganda. Because it's in a sense natural for us to discuss politics face to face, or at least we recognize that some level of discussion about politics is necessary and good, we're mostly ok with things like celebrities endorsing a candidate. A candidate traveling around the country and speaking to potential voters is pretty much fine. A single person expressing their views honestly isn't really guilty of "propaganda". The problem is when huge amounts of money get mixed up in it. In the US money doesn't buy you political power directly, but it does buy you a voice (in the form of advertisements using mass media). It's still up to the listeners to listen to your voice one way or the other, but the disproportionate loudness of people's voices ensures that arguments backed by money are supported much louder than those without money (this is the thesis of Manufactured Consent). Ok, this is less than ideal, but things probably aren't skewed that much regarding things like social issues. Political advertisement, in my opinion, doesn't veer into the realm of propaganda until one of two things happen: either the source is dishonest about their intentions (e.g. a person fully aware of climate change publicly denying it for financial reasons) and true beliefs, or their arguments are veiled in a way such that they do not appear to be advertisement at all. For example, suppose out of 100 homicides in the US, 10 were committed by Green people against Purple people, but a news organization decides to cover 5 homicides this week, and focuses solely on the ones between green and purple people. That doesn't look like an ad, even though it is one. The problem is that there's big money in this type of propaganda; these days political power is all about controlling narratives. It allows for a type of "inception" of beliefs and values - for example, making Green people think they're on the bring of a race war with Purple people - by letting people come to conclusions themselves after being presented by a highly slanted distribution of input. This type of belief-inception is precisely what Cambridge Analytica specialized in. By knowing demographic information, they could target individuals based on issues they knew they would be sensitive to, and slowly indoctrinate them with desired views. I'll use my race example again, because Robert Mercer is essentially an unapologetic racist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mercer_(businessman)#Race_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mercer_(businessman)#Ra.... You start by painting a narrative picture, highlighting race-related conflicts and painting a picture of deteriorating race relations. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, this stokes racial tensions, creating more incidents for you to curate. By misrepresenting the relative frequency of these types of occurrences, people gradually come to the conclusion that you want them to: in this case, that black people are becoming more racist towards white people. You can use this to bring over working-class white people to the Republicans. Another good example of this type of indoctrination was Gamergate (which essentially birthed Breitbart / the alt-right) being used to galvanize frustration with the social justice sphere into creating a community of young male "race-realists"

mhneu 9y ago
I agree the problem is money, and I also agree that bad faith and disinformation are true measures of problematic political communication. A principle we could rely on is openness. Just disclose who is paying for what. And disclose the ads. If Trump/CA/Russia targeted an ad at you distorting HRC's record, we should know who paid for it. Up until now, political ads - TV, billboards, even direct mail - were discoverable to the American public, so big distortions could be called out (even if they sometimes were not, as with GWB's racist attacks in SC on McCain's adopted kid.) But the current setup, where Facebook ads are effectively secret, is a big big problem. How do we know the ads were all honest? Let's just have FB release the 2016 ads so we America has time to figure out what to do before 2018.
- opportune 9y ago
  I agree with you in principle, but I'm not sure how feasible this given that I literally can't think of how to implement it. Political advocacy groups use complex hierarchies of shell companies and revolving payments to get money from super-donors into advertising. FB can't just release an invoice saying something like (Payment: 106,000; Sender: Robert Mercer) or "paid for by the Russian Federation". It would say things like "paid for by the Committee to Improve America", which receives money from the Pro-Families Committee, funded by the Traditionalists Group, an advocacy arm of the Peers Think Tank, which has ~100s of wealthy donors.
  - mhneu 9y ago
    It's very feasible, and even easy. You require disclosure of beneficial ownership of shell corps. That's already being done in some real estate markets to prevent money laundering: http://www.capdale.com/treasury-issues-final-regulations-to-address-use-of-us-llcs-to-disguise-beneficial-ownership http://www.capdale.com/treasury-issues-final-regulations-to-... Then we require that all money spent on politics (AND related political influencing, like money to Jud Watch and Cit U and Cato and AEI and Bradley Fdn and Am First and Koch Found and Americans for "Prosp" and the NRA) requires public disclosure of who's behind it. We already do much of this for direct campaign donations and in real estate. It's just a matter of political will. And one side has spent 4 decades and hundreds of billions on creating this money-first system, so they are very invested in not changing it. If you care, the first thing to do is get Congress to pass a law rescinding most of Cit U decision.

ekianjo 9y ago

> Propaganda is not received in the same way. Nothing new here, seriously. Propaganda from both sides before elections has existed for as long as there were political debates and political campaigns. The fact that we have now systems to make Propaganda more targeted may make it more effective than before, but that's all. In the end, believing or not in Propaganda is the individual's responsibility.

opportune 9y ago
I highly disagree. It's easier to simply disallow veiled political advertisements (propaganda) for both platforms and propagandists. Nobody has a "right" to spread propaganda, just like nobody has a right to defraud people simply because they aren't able to spot a scam
- swebs 9y ago
  >Nobody has a "right" to spread propaganda It's literally the first amendment.
  - opportune 9y ago
    There's a difference between me telling you my opinion on an issue and me knowingly spreading false information at a mass scale for personal gain. I think that specifically (in my layman's interpretation of law) does not fall under the first amendment's interpretation of allowing freedom of expression since the expression is not genuine, in the same way that fraud is not genuine. You would not be prosecuted for fraud for unwittingly spreading false information, but you would be for doing so wittingly and with incentive for making money
    - vtrenrn31 9y ago
      Why are you assuming that the information spread is false? Propaganda is not necessarily false, in fact, it is better if it is true. Platforms like Facebook would be well within their rights to try and prevent politically targeted advertising, even if it would be a fool's errand. Outlawing it would be unconstitutional. If they try to prevent "spreading of false information" by political advertisers I've no doubt they will simply be harsher on the propagandists who have a political aim at odds with Facebook's interests, one of which is stopping these hit pieces by those angry that Trump won. Nobody would be talking about this if Cambridge Analytica worked with Hillary. They simply want to stop their opponents from using the useful tool that is targeted advertising.

rdtsc 9y ago

> I think culturally we've accepted that political propaganda is different from run-of-the-mill corporate advertisement I think we want to believe that but hasn't been true for many years. Presidents sell a brand unfortunately, just like large companies do their commercials. With the same psychological and rhetorical tricks. One of my favorite examples I always bring up is this: http://adage.com/article/moy-2008/obama-wins-ad-age-s-marketer-year/131810/ http://adage.com/article/moy-2008/obama-wins-ad-age-s-market... notice how with much fanfare everyone was happily handing his campaign the marketing award. Normally that is not awarded to political candidates, it goes to Coke, Pepsi, Apple etc. --- "I honestly look at [Obama's] campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers," said Angus Macaulay, VP-Rodale marketing solutions "To see what he's done, to be able to create a social network and do it in a way where it's created the tools to let people get engaged very easily. It's very easy for people to participate." --- Social network they say? They couldn't mean using Facebook,could they? But, I think they are. An unsurprisingly Obama's campaign used the same methods as CA did: https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/business/economy/facebooks-rules-for-accessing-user-data-lured-more-than-just-cambridge-analytica/2018/03/19/31f6979c-658e-43d6-a71f-afdd8bf1308b_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/business/economy/face... --- Any time people used Facebook’s log-in button to sign on to the campaign’s website, the Obama data scientists were able to access their profile as well as their friends’ information. That allowed them to chart the closeness of people’s relationships and make estimates about which people would be most likely to influence other people in their network to vote. --- > Propaganda is not received in the same way. That's exactly why it is disguised not to be perceived as blatant propaganda. It works best when it is sneaking its way in via a seemingly unbiased publication, or news story, a comedy skit etc

mistermann 9y ago
The vast majority of people, and that includes HNers, don't think of that as propaganda. Well, if it was done by a Republican maybe you'd get somewhat better uptake, but I'm getting the feeling the American mind is highly resistant to any suggestion that things aren't as they're told they are. America is the Greatest Country of All Time, after all. It's starting to get very difficult to maintain this level of ignorance but most people are fighting the good fight, at least those who are even paying attention at all.