To understand racism in our digital society, follow the money.
The study of race and racism in the digital society must produce theoretically distinct and robust formulations of Internet technologies as key characteristics of the political economy. The author puts forth racial capitalism as a coherent framework for this research agenda. The argument for racial capitalism draws on two examples of its engagement with two characteristics of the digital society: obfuscation as privatization and exclusion by inclusion. Internet technologies are now a totalizing sociopolitical regime and should be central to the study of race and racism.
Digital blackface spreads disinformation through "sockpuppet" Twitter accounts
The recent rise of disinformation and propaganda on social media has attracted strong interest from social scientists. Research on the topic has repeatedly observed ideological asymmetries in disinformation content and reception, wherein conservatives are more likely to view, redistribute, and believe such content. However, preliminary evidence has suggested that race may also play a substantial role in determining the targeting and consumption of disinformation content. Such racial asymmetries may exist alongside, or even instead of, ideological ones. Our computational analysis of 5.2 million tweets by the Russian government-funded “troll farm” known as the Internet Research Agency sheds light on these possibilities. We find stark differences in the numbers of unique accounts and tweets originating from ostensibly liberal, conservative, and Black left-leaning individuals. But diverging from prior empirical accounts, we find racial presentation—specifically, presenting as a Black activist—to be the most effective predictor of disinformation engagement by far. Importantly, these results could only be detected once we disaggregated Black-presenting accounts from non-Black liberal accounts. In addition to its contributions to the study of ideological asymmetry in disinformation content and reception, this study also underscores the general relevance of race to disinformation studies.
Political content from Russian trolls appears crafted to exploit intergroup distrust and enmity - on both sides of the aisle
Evidence from an analysis of Twitter data reveals that Russian social media trolls exploited racial and political identities to infiltrate distinct groups of authentic users, playing on their group identities. The groups affected spanned the ideological spectrum, suggesting the importance of coordinated counter-responses from diverse coalitions of users.