The Rise of Weaponized Flak in the New Media Era. Brian Michael Goss
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characteristics significantly altered their behavior as measured by clicks and purchases” (Matz, Kosinski, Nave, & Stillwell, 2017, p. 12714). Facebook likes enable inferences into personality, for example, tendencies toward introversion/extraversion and open/closed postures toward new experience. Utilizing these inferences to tailor messages shows notable effects across large audiences: “Persuasive appeals that were matched to people’s extraversion or openness-to-experience level resulted in up to 40-percent more clicks and up to 50-percent more purchases” as compared with control groups (2017, p. 12714). Messages that are 40- or 50-percent more likely to elicit the messenger’s desired response can be said to have gone an appreciable distance toward prediction and control over audience response.
Fast-forwarding to the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign, Alexander Nix (2016) of Cambridge Analytica discusses the use of psychographics in ←28 | 29→political advertising. In particular, the model that Nix endorses as powerful captures an audience member’s openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (acronymized as OCEAN). Informed by data-driven precision, a pro-gun ad can be designed on the assumption that distinctly different, psychographics-rooted motivations can stimulate a person’s support for guns. Pro-gun ads can thusly be designed for framing around safety (e.g., “your home invaded”)—or, alternatively, around tradition that appeals to arms passed “from father to son,” in a traditional androgenic lineage (Nix, 2016). In other words, psychographic approaches assay to take the pulse of motivations and the internal lives of specific audience members—and do so for instrumental purposes of blasting impactful messages directed at a particular person’s psychological makeup.
In this environment that draws on detailed portraits of audience members, the producers of messages encounter far less guesswork and risk of having their messages ignored. Messages can be designed to more readily push a given person’s idiosyncratic buttons than the billboard by the highway that radiates the same message to all who pass it. Control model visions of “hypodermic needle” messaging injected directly into the audience may never be realized. Nevertheless, psychographics-informed messaging can plausibly take significant steps toward heightened prediction and control of audience reactions when applied on a mass scale.
The implications for flak are straightforward as concerns crafting messages that will reach an audience member’s wheelhouse, wherever it may be. Moreover, flak memes more readily gain legs under them by making a debut before what could be called “a pre-existing hostile audience” that is inclined to seize on the negativism of flak toward a disfavored entity (Katherine Cross, quoted in Jeong, 2018, p. 25); it is also the type of like-minded audience that is also far easier to convene in a segmented media environment.
Two phenomena of further interest to the study of flak gain impetus in the new millennium’s new media environment: directional motivation and illusory truth. As concerns the former, D.J. Flynn and colleague’s recent review of the literature suggests movement full circle back to Lazarsfeld: “Directionally motivated reasoning leads people to seek out information that reinforces their preferences (i.e., confirmation bias), counterargue information that contradicts their preferences (i.e., disconfirmation bias), and view proattitudinal information as more convincing than counterattitudinal information” (2017, p. 132). Flynn and colleagues are not optimistic about how, within an avalanche of messages, audiences ←29 | 30→resolve the tension between sorting out the truth and finding reinforcement: “Facts are always at least potentially vulnerable to directional motivated reasoning, especially when they are politicized by elites.” As a result, contemporary political conflict is not simply arguing over the narrower matters of “issues and public policy, but over reality itself” (emphasis added; Flynn, Nyhan, & Reifler, 2017, p. 144). When a concept of shared reality itself becomes increasingly contested, flak correspondingly thrives in the hot-house of ideologically-driven niches.
The concept of illusory truth also furnishes impetus for making outlandish claims in service of flak to influence audiences. Gordon Pennycook and colleagues (2018) report a series of experiments in which subjects appraise demonstrated-to-be-false headlines as significantly more plausible for having previously seen them only one time. The effect of even one prior exposure on plausibility measurably endures for at least a week. Wholly implausible control condition statements get no such boost for familiarity (e.g., positing the Earth is square), while true statements still rate higher than false ones. Nonetheless, the study underlines the incentive to move the needle of opinion via repeated tendentious statements, since the feeling of familiarity in having “heard this one before” is readily conflated with plausibility.
Indeed, the audience may not even be the flesh-and-blood audience anymore—at least not completely. The strategic use of bots and cyborg social media accounts can be managed to move the needle of opinion, in part, by circumventing the need to influence the minds of real persons. Molly K. McKew (2018) of the New Media Frontier details one such campaign in 2018. The campaign pushed Congressperson Devin Nunes’ so-called “intelligence memo” that flaked Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts to Trumpian specifications. Deliberate coordination and amplification of tweets by right-wing activists and Russian cyber-agents across 11 days pushed the “release the memo” topic into a trending one—and did so with a boost from “audience members” who were not anyone’s friends and neighbors, but tweet-amplifying-through-retweeting bots. A simulated audience performed for a real one to push the hashtag. Phenomena along these lines have become prevalent enough that it has a name—computational propaganda—and a unit at Oxford University dedicated to its study.
In other words, the contemporary moment has realized the long-held dream of at least partly interrupting the monologues of the media oligopolies of the twentieth century. At the same time, new media platforms have, by the advent of the third decade of the millennium, exhibited characteristics ←30 | 31→(rigorous segmenting of the audience, deployment of surveillance and psychographics) that lend themselves to an intensifying flak regime.
Having considered the audience, a necessary element to a flak campaign, I will now orient to basic dimensions of understanding flak; to begin, what is the scale of what I am defining as flak?
Definition: What Is/Is Not Flak?
In the previous chapter, I defined flak as tactics and strategies toward political harassment. To reiterate, flak is permeated with power, it is purposefully employed toward sociopolitical goals, and weaponized to disparage, delegitimize, and disable people and organizations. Below, I will endeavor to make the term less abstracted and ascribe more concrete characteristics to it. I will also delineate flak subtypes, in part through pertinent case studies. The stakes of this discussion are that flak often arises from the shadows to menace its targets with sadistic, bad faith scrutiny and delegitimization. In constructing a detailed account of flak, naming it and its sub-types, flak itself becomes the unwilling object of scrutiny—albeit, with demands for accuracy and dispassion that do not perturb flak discourses.
Flak: How Big?
There are situations that are too serious to merit description as flak; murder, for example. Flak-mongers seek to kill a reputation rather than a person, as cashiering someone’s good name is sufficient for flak purposes. Similarly, physical assault is beyond flak for its literal bare-knuckled quality.
Flak should also not be construed as identity-based prejudice that is embedded in structural (often legalized, officially-sanctioned) forms of harassment to beat down subaltern populations. Examples of prejudice embedded in institutional practices include the terrors of Jim Crow in the United States. The more recent “hostile environment” program in the United Kingdom is also more than flak as it was the platform for undifferentiated harassment of immigrants in their regular encounters with the State (e.g., in the hospital, at school, with police officers in the streets). I posit that these chauvinistic practices are more serious than flak in their society-wide scale and diffusion into some of the everyday details of the victims’ lives. That said, systemic abuses surely have smaller flak episodes embedded within them—but are distinct from flak campaigns in being systemized by ←31 | 32→deeply inscribed custom and law in the first place. By contrast with diffuse systematic abuses, flak that is directed at and focused on a specific person or organization toward clear political objectives presents flak’s most evident and damaging form.