PUBLIC RELATIONS AND SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE POST-TRUTH ERAUSING CONCEPT AND CRITIQUES OF PROPAGANDA TO ASSESS POST-TRUTH SOCIAL

MEDIA ENVIRONMENTS AND DATA ETHICS

DR. ANDREW MCWHIRTER

DR. HEIKE PUCHAN

GLASGOW CALEDONIAN UNIVERSITY

AIM

• To explore the relevance of concepts of propaganda for public relations and social media in the post-truth era

• To highlight the importance of data ethics

• To use a case-study approach to demonstrate how social media discourse is changing communication practices of propaganda and public relations

DEFINING PROPAGANDA

• Propaganda, from New Latin, propagare to Propagate

• From religious doctrines seeking to spread … to theera of ‘spreadable media’ (Jenkins, 2013) in digital space

• The core of propaganda is faith and faith is nevermoretested than with fake news (kernels of truth/believability) or post-truths (emotional investment)

• Although twinned with ‘P’olitics today one should never forget these innate characteristics

• Even if Bernays (1928) infused politics and commerce as one when he wrote on and practiced propaganda

Propaganda is understood by some as the “deliberate, systematic attempt to shape Perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist” (Jowett & O’Donnell, 2015: 7)

Recent development in thinking that propaganda is a form of strategic communication whichis employed by corporations, politicians, terrorist groups alike (see e.g. Wilbur, 2017)

DEFINING PROPAGANDA

SOCIAL MEDIA RESEARCH ETHICS

• Increasingly of mainstream academic interest since Association of Internet Researchers Ethical Decision Making Report (2012 – ten year update to 2002 report)

• Same historical research ethics apply but can be more pronounced or need to be reconfigured for digital space

• Data ethics is the hot topic for commerce and academia moving to 2020

• Did a US retail store really know a 16-year old girl was pregnant before her parents did? And did London café users really promise to give away their first-born children for free wi-fi?

METHODS

Case Study: technology, commerce, media and consumer discoursesaround Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (2017)

Niche search engines: Boardreader, BuzzSumo, Tweetdeck, Delve

Open Data Analytics software COSMOS (Burnap, et al. 2014)

Part ‘big data’ API trawling according to the Three Vs definition (citedIn Staff et al. 2016:4)

Not data scientists so qualitative content analysis deployed!

Amit Agarwal, founder of Digital inspiration (2004-) and India’s ‘first professional blogger’.

CASE STUDY: TRACING PROPAGANDA VIA BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (2017)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVDQpwNIBCoNews Views 16 March 2017

MACHINE LEARNING

MORAL PANIC

CASE STUDY: TRACING PROPAGANDA VIA BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (2017)

ONE MONTH ON COSMOS SOFTWARE 24HR (19-20 APRIL ) DATA ANALYSIS REVEALS DISCOURSE CONTINUES ON TWITTER WITH ‘GAY’ AND ‘BANNED’ KEY WORDS STILL DOMINATING DISCUSSIONS

MEMECULTURE

CASE STUDY: TRACING PROPAGANDA VIA BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (2017)

COSMOS SHOWS KEY TWEET AND RE-TWEET SOURCES… TWEETDECK LINK TO ORIGINAL SOURCE

…AND POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SENTIMENT SCORES (SENTISTRENGTH)…

… AND GENDER BREAKDOWN – OR HOW DIFFICULT IT IS TO ASCERTAIN THIS VIA TWITTER PROFILES, POSTS AND AVATARS?

COMBINED WITH QUALITATIVE CONTENT SEARCHES USING DELVE AND TWITTER SEARCH KEYS IT IS CLEAR THAT COUNTER DISCOURSES ARE ABUNDANT IN THE INTERIM PERIOD

COMBINED WITH QUALITATIVE CONTENT SEARCHES USING DELVE AND TWITTER SEARCH KEYS IT IS CLEAR THAT COUNTER DISCOURSES ARE ABUNDANT IN THE INTERIM PERIOD

… AND IN PARTICULAR REMIX AND MEME CULTURES

CONCLUSIONS• Data ethics and social media research methods must be considered at the outset of

any online research and also continually as that research develops.

• Considerations here have been given to harm (mainly reputational), ToS, the subject/author frame, and ownership of the reproduced/researched content

• Multiple free tools were used from more bespoke search engines to big data gathering software

• Here we can see three layers of propaganda: commerce, moral panic discourses, and finally consumer and user counter-propaganda.

• It is in the final forms that social media excels via humour and meme culture and perhaps for the first time could suggest something other than a purely negative representation of propaganda in action

BIBLIOGRAPHY• Beaulieu, Anne and Estalella, Adolfo (2012) 'Rethinking research ethics for mediated settings' in Information,

Communication & Society Vol. 15, No. 1, pp.23-42.• Bernays, Edward [2005] (1928) Propaganda. New York: IG Publishing. • Burnap, P., Rana, O., Williams, M., Housley, W., Edwards, A., Morgan, J, Sloan, L. and Conejero, J. (2014) ‘COSMOS:

Towards an Integrated and Scalable Service for Analyzing Social Media on Demand’, International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems.

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Business Horizons, 59-69.• Jowett, G.S, and O’Donnell, V. (2015) Propaganda and Persuasion, 5th ed. Los Angeles: Sage.• L’Etang, Jacquie (2006) ‘Public Relations and Propaganda: Conceptual Issues, Methodological Problems and Public

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• Wilbur, Douglas (2017) ‘Propaganda’s Place in Strategic Communication: The case Of ISIL’s Dabiq magazine’, International Journal of Strategic Communication, Vol. 11, pp.1-15.