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.
Media literacy can sometimes spread disinformation - with a little help from search engine algorithms
The Propagandists’ Playbook peels back the layers of the right-wing media manipulation machine to reveal why its strategies are so effective and pervasive, while also humanizing the people whose worldviews and media practices conservatism embodies. Based on interviews and ethnographic observations of two Republican groups over the course of the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial race—including the author’s firsthand experience of the 2017 Unite the Right rally—the book considers how Google algorithms, YouTube playlists, pundits, and politicians can manipulate audiences, reaffirm beliefs, and expose audiences to more extremist ideas, blurring the lines between reality and fiction. Francesca Tripodi argues that conservatives who embody the Christian worldview give authoritative weight to original texts and interrogate the media using the same tools taught to them in Bible study—for example, using Google to “fact check” the news. The result of this practice, tied to conservative marketing tactics, is more than a reaffirmation of existing beliefs: it is a radicalization of content and a changing of narratives adopted by the media. Tripodi also demonstrates the pervasiveness of white supremacy in the conservative media ecosystem, as well as its mainstream appeal, scope, and spread.
Political candidates draw on their personal identities to build social identity-based coalitions
In this chapter, Kreiss and McGregor focus on candidate and campaign strategic attempts at “identity ownership” (Kreiss, Lawrence, and McGregor 2020) during primary election campaigns, especially through digital and social media. Identity ownership occurs when voters perceive a candidate as a plausible “prototype” (Jackson and Hogg, 2010) for a particular group. This prototypicality is marked by the perception that a candidate fits within and represents said group’s characteristics, norms, and values. To date, a robust body of literature has analyzed candidate “issue ownership” (e.g., Egan 2013), wherein politicians seek to align themselves with the issues their party is perceived by voters as having unique competency to address. Here the authors build on their previous work to analyze and empirically document how during primary elections candidates craft rhetoric and campaigns create communications that attempt to make some identities salient in the minds of voters, align candidates and their platforms with particular intrapartisan social identities, and craft and “extend” their own identities for electoral gain. Their argument is that through communication, and especially given the affordances of digital and social media that facilitate speaking to narrow slices of the electorate (Kreiss, Lawrence, and McGregor 2018), candidates and campaigns strive to construct and convey the identities of the groups of constituents they seek to represent, including conveying information about the policies they will pursue through the lens of appealing to these particular social groups.