The propagandists' playbook How conservative elites manipulate search and threaten democracy

Francesca Bolla Tripodi

Book - 2022

"A sociotechnical society must consider how data-driven and algorithmic systems impact decision-making at both the macro-level, such as policy and culture, and the micro-level, such as voting and purchasing. Tripodi applies social theory to her empirical research on how communities make meaning and engage with data-driven and algorithmic systems in everyday life. Her data reveal that conservative elites use media platforms in unintended or unanticipated ways, threatening the democratic process. The Propagandists' Playbook peels back the layers of the media manipulation machine and reveals why conservative elites are so effective at exploiting their constituents' worldviews and media practices. Tripodi gives examples of keywor...ds, frames, and co-optive tactics to give readers an idea of what this information ecosystem looks like. Ultimately, her findings are much broader. They represent a more nuanced understanding of the keywords and processes conservative pundits and politicians rely on to amplify, validate, and normalize white supremacist logic. This book is also a call to action for how we can break the disinformation loop. Most efforts reactively target misinformation, but to treat "information disorder" proactively, we need more ethnographic research on how cultural logics and contextual media literacy are exploited. After finishing this book, some might ask how search engines like Google can fix an increasingly bifurcated internet. But Tripodi believes that's the wrong question. What she observed is an ever-evolving sociotechnical issue and the vulnerability is democracy. Remaining obsessed with a fix, misses the root of the dynamic at play-conservative elites are leveraging cultural frames, and without an ethnographic lens, their tactics remain invisible. Disinformation is not a bug in the code, it's a feature wielded for political gain. The seven steps she outlines form the Propagandists' Playbook. Knowing the concerns of their audiences, leveraging a media network, drawing on conservative forms of media literacy, understanding how information flows, seeding the internet with information, connecting old ideas to new thinkers, and then encouraging audiences to engage in a curated form of self-discovery create a powerful disinformation circuit. By revealing these tactics and methods for manipulating information, Tripodi hopes that this book will help break this decades-old disinformation cycle"-- more