Online propagandists know how to captivate their audiences, and that's what we're missing.

As the horrors of right-wing extremists clashing with police and even rioting unfold in cities across the UK in recent days, many are wondering how to stop the spread of propaganda that promotes racism, violence and misogyny.

The harsh truth is that fact-checking misinformation and forcing social media companies to remove hateful content is wrong. In the place of each removed message, another message just pops up. Those who plant propaganda are far more sophisticated than those who try to stop them. They don’t think about the message, they think about the audience. Hate is clickbait. And social media algorithms put it on steroids.

The riots began in Southport, where a group of people attacked a mosque, claiming to be protesting the stabbing deaths of three young girls in the area. They appeared to believe the attack was carried out by immigrants (which was not the case). More than 50 police officers were injured responding to the emergency.

Misleading messages about the Southport attack were posted online, with Reform MP Nigel Farage questioning whether we were being lied to about the identity of the Southport attacker (although he told the BBC he was simply expressing the sadness and concern that everyone he knew felt).

Our working definition of propaganda is hopelessly outdated because it all focuses on the message. And the message doesn’t matter. Propagandists will say anything to generate clicks, revenue, or power. They will post calls to build walls and stop ships. They will claim that those children were killed in the name of Islam. Factual accuracy doesn’t matter. What matters is that online influencers identify and target their power base.

When their words are deleted, they will simply find another way to talk to the people they are trying to reach. In the meantime, they can claim to be censored victims of the establishment. They appeal to emotions rather than reason, and their message is ridiculous and offensive to the rest of us, but it captivates their audience. Therefore, our focus should be on that audience rather than the message.

imagined community

Modern propagandists create what political scientist Benedict Anderson describes as imagined communities. He argues that nations and states (and their media) are founded by successfully creating communities with their own founding myths, symbols, and histories. This is consistent with the work of propaganda theorist Jacques Ellul, who argues that myths are central and necessary to successful propaganda.

Some symbols are well known and widely shared by all of us: the Spitfire, the British Barbie, the royal family. But others, like the cockroach immigrant, the loss of national action, the language of conspiracy theories, are the foundation of communities that speak only to themselves. Worse, they leave those who do not share their beliefs naïve and need to do their own research. In her book Among the Trolls, the BBC’s disinformation and social media correspondent Mariana Spring uncovers the algorithmic rabbit hole and its own imagined community.

These myths are also fundamental to the process of creating propaganda. Traditionally, propaganda is the justification for war that a country uses to call people to war. Likewise, today’s racist prejudices and incel-related misogyny all come from propaganda. For example, the influential Andrew Tate made a name for himself by calling troops to fight for his cause.

A young Muslim protester is doused with spit in Manchester. Alamy

As Ellul said, hatred is generally the most profitable resource. Hatred is probably the most natural and common emotion. It is the attribution of one's own misfortunes and sins to others. Propaganda is successful whenever someone is pointed out as the source of all misfortunes. Unless, of course, that person is too powerful.

Add social media bots to the mix and you have a poisonous mess for the democratic public sphere.

Finding the Lost

Fact-checking isn’t useless, but it doesn’t solve the core problem. It’s better to identify silos and work with their constituents. We can weaken the message we send to those who are causing unrest on the streets by getting other, better sources. We can even block some networks that provide content.

This is better than whacking a mole on fake news. Once you have identified the silos of information, you can target the algorithms that create them and the algorithms that target or isolate them. Then you can reach out to these groups and introduce alternative views, new symbols, and basic myths, and mediate and improve the problem by neutralizing the effects of the algorithms that led to the silos.

Spring writes about the lives of those who have been destroyed, the scammers who create clickbait, and most of all, the people who have been dragged down. Fact-checking simply assures converts that those who do not share such views have taken the blue pill of blissful ignorance rather than the red pill of painful knowledge.

Malicious actors are more than ready to fill that area with shit, as Trump adviser Steve Bannon put it. It’s impossible to eliminate misinformation, but by putting our audience first, we can probably find the ones who are missing and guide them through the storm.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://theconversation.com/riots-in-the-uk-online-propagandists-know-how-to-work-their-audiences-this-is-what-we-are-missing-236084 The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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