Reopen Demands as Public Health Threat: A Sociotechnical Framework for Understanding the Stickiness of Misinformation

Discursive strategies help justify incompliance with public safety protocols

In the absence of a national, coordinated, response to COVID-19, state and local representatives had to create and enforce individualized plans to protect their constituents. Alongside the challenge of trying to curb the virus, public health officials also had to contend with the spread of false information. This problematic content often contradicted safeguards, like masks, while promoting unverified and potentially lethal treatments. One of the most active groups denying the threat of COVID is The Reopen the States Movement. By combining qualitative content analysis with ethnographic observations of public ReOpen groups on Facebook, this paper provides a better understanding of the central narratives circulating among ReOpen members and the information they relied on to support their arguments. Grounded in notions of individualism and self-inquiry, members sought to reinterpret datasets to downplay the threat of COVID and suggest public safety workarounds. When the platform tried to flag problematic content, lack of institutional trust had members doubting the validity of the fact-checkers, highlight the tight connection between misinformation and epistemology.

Facebook and Google are the central players in digital political advertising – and they’re hardly neutral content platforms

Previous research has found that digital advertising companies such as Facebook and Google function similarly to political consultants, influencing the messaging choices of political clients. This paper situates those insights in the theory of parties as extended networks and presents the first quantitative descriptive analysis of all companies that have provided federal political committees with digital advertising services in national elections. Network analysis measures of political groups registered with the Federal Election Committee in the United States (n = 2,064) and the types of companies they hired for digital political advertising services (political agencies, commercial agencies, digital advertising platforms, or other; n = 1,022) over three midterm and general elections (2006–2016) show that the number of political committees and companies have both dramatically increased since 2008 and that Facebook and Google have become the two most central members of the network. As influencers of the targeting and content of campaign messages, these companies should be considered consequential members of electoral party 0networks. This study contributes to research on political consulting and to the theory of parties as extended networks by demonstrating how opening the inclusion criteria for subject selection can uncover unexpected players, such as the private, previously considered nonpartisan, nonpolitical companies present here.

Lack of standardization among platform political ad policies and products is causing problems for democracy

In the wake of the 2016 Brexit and U.S. presidential elections, the major platform companies including Facebook (and Instagram), Google (and YouTube), and Twitter implemented significant changes in the scope of the products and services they offer as well as their policies for working in institutional politics, especially in the context of digital political advertising. For example, all three companies rolled out verification processes for political advertisers and ad databases for the public. Facebook ended commissions on political ad sales and its “embed” program with campaigns. Google placed restrictions on political microtargeting and Twitter ended political advertising entirely and placed restrictions on what it has named “cause-based” advertising. This paper analyzes the policies and products of platform companies with respect to digital political advertising in the U.S. Our focus is on social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, and YouTube) and the advertising capabilities that you can access through them, as well as Google search and the Google display
network.