Episode 87
How Has the Internet Shaped American Politics?
This week, following an election cycle dominated by misinformation, AI, social media, and a… well, strange blossoming relationship between a Silicon Valley billionaire and the 47th President, I think it’s time to look closer at the relationship between technology and politics. How has social media impacted US politics? How is this being regulated? And ultimately, how has the internet changed American politics?
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Special guest for this episode:
- Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a Professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. She is former president of the Association of Internet Researchers, and she is author of the widely-acclaimed book Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age.
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Highlights from this episode:
- In this episode, we explored the complex relationship between technology and politics, particularly focusing on social media's influence in shaping political narratives and public opinion.
- Jennifer Stroma Galley shared insights on how social media platforms, especially during election cycles, have become battlegrounds for misinformation and targeted political advertising.
- We discussed the impact of tech giants like Elon Musk and their affiliations with political candidates, raising questions about the ethical implications of such relationships.
- The episode delves into the evolution of political fundraising through social media, highlighting how candidates like Trump have mastered the art of leveraging online platforms for financial support.
- We highlighted the importance of media literacy in today's information age, as the cacophony of voices online makes it challenging for individuals to discern fact from fiction.
- Listeners were reminded that while social media can empower grassroots movements, it also poses risks of misinformation and ideological echo chambers that can threaten democratic processes
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Additional Resources:
Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age by Jennifer Stromer-Galley
Jennifer Stromer-Galley - iSchool | Syracuse University
Social Media: Are TikTok videos the way to win an election? - BBC News
12 States With Teens' Social Media Regulation- Is Yours One of Them?
Facebook, Cambridge Analytica scandal: Everything you need to know
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And if you like this episode, you might also love:
What Was the Constitutional Convention?
Why Does the President Only Serve Two Terms?
Is the President Above the Law?
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- Individuals - support the show with a one-off or monthly donation: https://america-a-history.captivate.fm/support
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Transcript
This week, following an election cycle dominated by misinformation AI social media and, well, strange blossoming relationship between a Silicon Valley billionaire and the 47th president, I think it's time to look closer at the relationship between technology and politics.
Speaker A:How has social media impacted US Politics?
Speaker A:How is this being regulated?
Speaker A:And ultimately, how has the Internet changed American politics?
Speaker A:Welcome to America, a history Podcast.
Speaker A:I'm Liam Heffernan, and every week we answer a different question to understand the people, the places, and the events that make the USA a what it is today.
Speaker A:To discuss this, I am joined by a professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.
Speaker A:She is former president of the association of Internet Researchers, and her book, Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age was widely acclaimed and listing all of her accolades and accomplishments would take up this entire episode.
Speaker A:So we'll just leave that for the show notes, and I'll put all the links in there for you to enjoy.
Speaker A:A huge, huge welcome to the podcast, Jennifer Stroma Galley.
Speaker B:Thanks for having me.
Speaker B:It's my pleasure.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Really, really good to get you on the podcast, especially at this particular time, as we were just sort of saying before recording just how important this conversation is at the moment, when we consider the whole Musk Trump dynamic, it's.
Speaker A:It's really giving a new meaning to social media, isn't it?
Speaker B:Absolutely.
Speaker B:There's a new power in the.
Speaker B:I don't know how to put this.
Speaker B:There's like kind of a new power center happening in the United States right now.
Speaker A:Yeah, it feels like it's been bubbling for a little while, though.
Speaker A:You know, Silicon Valley has been this sort of spiritual home for a lot of rich and wealthy people.
Speaker A:And obviously they've controlled a lot of the data that flows through the US and even around the world.
Speaker A:So I guess we can't be that surprised that now this is a big issue, can we?
Speaker B:No, I agree with you that this is not new.
Speaker B:Exactly.
Speaker B: anies going back to, say, the: Speaker B:They weren't forming lobbies, they weren't contributing substantial amounts of money to political campaigns.
Speaker B: And really, in the: Speaker B:Some of that is because Congress began to pay more attention to the tech companies.
Speaker B: hit Facebook coming into the: Speaker B:Basically trying to build or promising to build algorithms that would allow companies and politicians to target ads to people based on personalities.
Speaker B:So basically a specialized message that would speak to you based on your personality as a optimistic, open, conscientious human or whatever.
Speaker B:And that was.
Speaker B:It violated what Cambridge Analytica was doing at that time in harvesting this data, actually violated Facebook policies.
Speaker B:And so Facebook clamped down at that point, but of course, Facebook, TikTok.
Speaker B:Sorry, that's funny.
Speaker B:Facebook x Twitter at the time, Google got pulled before Congress and they had to be held to account.
Speaker B:And so that, I think, really shifted the ways that the tech companies began to see their role in the political environment.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker A:Cambridge Analytica just feels like a lifetime ago now.
Speaker A:And it was such a huge issue at the time.
Speaker B:It was.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:And, you know, these kind of ripple effects.
Speaker B:Right, that you can't really foresee at the time.
Speaker B:It just looked like this moment.
Speaker B:And of course, the Republican candidates were using Cambridge Analytica, both Ted Cruz's candidate campaign, and then eventually Donald Trump's campaign both used that company.
Speaker B:And so.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So fast forward to today.
Speaker B:Maybe it's not such a surprise that Elon Musk is hanging out in Donald Trump's right pocket.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And I mean, of course, we can't forget as well.
Speaker A:I mean, Elon Musk at first was jumping on the Ron DeSantis bandwagon, helping him launch his campaign in a fairly disastrous fashion on Twitter.
Speaker A:And so he wanted.
Speaker A:He wanted to insert himself somehow.
Speaker A:And it feels like once Trump started to be the clear frontrunner, he then put himself into that campaign.
Speaker A:But he's.
Speaker A:He's sort of taken over, hasn't he?
Speaker A:Like, he's.
Speaker A:He's like the face of MAGA at the moment.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:In a somewhat surprising and funny way.
Speaker B:But there's long been a libertarian streak within kind of Internet culture.
Speaker B: So when you think back to the: Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B: So back in the: Speaker B:The World Wide Web hadn't yet been dreamed up as a thing.
Speaker B:HTML, the mouse, didn't exist.
Speaker B: But in: Speaker B:And bulletin boards were these online, very simple terminals that you could access, little servers that were mostly on the west coast, the United States.
Speaker B:And, you know, they brought together early technology lovers, people who love PCs and tinkering with their technologies.
Speaker B:And that sort of gave rise then eventually to Usenet, which was early kind of email, and eventually then HTML based discussions.
Speaker B:There was something called Internet Relay Chat, irc, which was a synchronous version that allowed people to chat.
Speaker B: That was the early: Speaker B:And the people that came together were predominantly men, predominantly younger men, well educated and fairly libertarian in their political ideology.
Speaker B:So not quite Republican, not quite Democrat.
Speaker B:And I think there is still some of that ethos in the thinking about technology.
Speaker B:Let technology be free, don't regulate it.
Speaker B:Allow these companies to do what they can and should be doing to grow their influence, their import, their, you know, their experimentation and the evolution of these technologies.
Speaker B:And so this kind of anti regulatory ethos that lives within the, the tech bro culture means that I think that a lot of these technology heads, these corporate technology heads, are going to align themselves with the party that's empowered, that they think will allow them to continue to operate unregulated.
Speaker A:Yeah, and that brings in a whole different dynamic to this conversation where we, you know, thinking, you know, not even about the content, but about the kind of the corporate incentives that these social media bosses have in aligning themselves with the right political candidates.
Speaker A:And I mean, this isn't anything new.
Speaker A:You know, companies would donate to both parties all the time, you know, when they had the money to, because it would get them favors, whoever was then, you know, in the White House.
Speaker A:But it does feel like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos and all the other bosses in Silicon Valley have really doubled down, though, on their Trump alliance.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:And that's not something we've seen before, is it?
Speaker B:It's not, no.
Speaker B:I agree.
Speaker B:That's new.
Speaker B:But then, you know, we're seeing it across the board.
Speaker B:So it's not, not even technology companies, but corporations more broadly.
Speaker B:There's just a kind of a big kerfuffle on the Internet in my social media circles talking about companies like Costco, Target, these are our box stores that have diversity equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives.
Speaker B:DEIA and the Trump administration, you know, day one, issued executive orders closing any efforts at diversity inclusion in the federal government, but then extending that now to basically pressure corporations to pull back.
Speaker B:And some have.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So you see companies like.
Speaker B:And again, this is all happening on social media, right?
Speaker B:So Trump is still legislating through social media, as he did during his first presidency.
Speaker B:So these tech companies are.
Speaker B:Sorry, it's not even the tech companies, but regular companies are functionally falling in line because they're worried about the regulations, regulatory environment that potentially unfolds if they don't acquiesce to these, these policies.
Speaker B:So I think, you know, this concerns me as a student of democracy, that what we see right now is a presidency that has a very, very strong executive branch that is functionally unchecked because the legislative branch isn't necessarily going to hold Trump to account because the Republicans are in power, both chambers of our legislative branch.
Speaker B:And so I think that the tech companies recognize that they have a great opportunity right now potentially to push regulation in their favor because they have a president that is sympathetic to them.
Speaker B:And I think there's also just a little bit of fear that if they don't get in line and fall, you know, kind of as a group behind Trump, then they face some kind of retribution.
Speaker B:Because that's Trump's movie.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And kind of going back to this idea of, you know, Trump legislating through social media, I think there's a really interesting point here around the sort of the, the, the discourse and how that's driven by social media.
Speaker A:Because, you know, I, I think it's probably fair to say that the argument from the left would be that the right are kind of poisoning online discourse with, you know, misinformation and, you know, and, you know, narratives just aren't true.
Speaker A:And the right, however, would counter that and say that, well, no, this has been a very left dominated, you know, space.
Speaker A:You know, the media have always driven a very liberal narrative.
Speaker A:So we're just, we're just balancing that.
Speaker A:I mean, where's the truth amidst all of that?
Speaker B:Such a big question.
Speaker B:Well, so is that.
Speaker B:Well, so, yeah, I didn't know to start.
Speaker B:So the, the information environment back in the broadcast era.
Speaker B: So I'm thinking the: Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So in that era, especially the 50s, through the night, through the early 80s, there were basically three television stations or four television stations, the United States, depending on where you lived.
Speaker B:And you had maybe a local paper that came to your mail once a day, either in the morning or at night, and you had radio.
Speaker B:And so the information environment, in fact, looking back at the research about the media, especially the news media, at that time, there were concerns about the corporate nature of the news in the United States.
Speaker B:We don't have the kind of fee based public broadcasting environment that the UK has.
Speaker B:And so this kind of corporatized news environment was of concern to researchers because it still pushed a particular ideological message.
Speaker B:It looked mainstream, it looked neutral, as quote, unquote, news, professionalized news.
Speaker B:But functionally, there were real problems with that news environment.
Speaker B:It did quash voices.
Speaker B:And in fact, in the early 90s, as the world Wide Web began to take off and people started to realize that, wait, if I knew a little bit of HTML, which is the programming language that drives websites in those early days, I could actually make my own webpage and then I could have my own voice out there for the public to see.
Speaker B:And that early kind of pre.
Speaker B:Well, no, I guess that.
Speaker B:That early Internet era, there's a lot of excitement actually about this democratization, little d.
Speaker B:Democratization, where anybody can now have a voice and no longer would these corporations who controlled the information environment basically kind of silence perspectives or push particular perspectives that were beneficial to corporate interests.
Speaker B:So you get this, this proliferation, right, of websites and eventually you get blogs.
Speaker B:You know, blogs became a really hot thing for a while and you know, you had email lists and all of these other mechanisms.
Speaker B:And that gave rise to citizen journalism, right?
Speaker B:This idea that ordinary citizens now could be journalists.
Speaker B:They didn't have to be professionals who worked for a news outlet.
Speaker B:They could be ordinary people out on street talking to people, reporting, whatever.
Speaker B: And then, of course,: Speaker B: You know,: Speaker B:And over the next decade you start to see that Twitter becomes this platform where people could sort of share current events and things that were happening.
Speaker B:It became a very beneficial crisis platform.
Speaker B:So if there was a major environmental event or social or cultural event, like for example, Arab Spring, right, The protests were happening in the Middle east in the, again the early teens, a lot of hype was posted or kind of posed around X as a platform that allowed people to coordinate, organize and report what was happening that led to these democratic protests.
Speaker B:So all that seems positive.
Speaker B:And this kind of multiple voices can spread, right?
Speaker B:And in some ways that's very much true.
Speaker B:And it's still true, right?
Speaker B:So with the proliferation of communication channels that now exist through social media still, we have blogs, still have websites, we still have traditional television broadcast.
Speaker B:So now you have this very complex information environment.
Speaker B:And on the one hand, I do think it opens up new voices to engage in the political process and share their perspectives.
Speaker B:But on the other hand, it also has opened up, I think, vulnerabilities.
Speaker B:There is such a cacophony of information that I think for ordinary people as they go about their day trying to figure out what's actually legitimate fact based information and what is not is hard.
Speaker B:It requires time, it requires attention, it requires knowledge.
Speaker B:And you know, all of us have some of those things but we often don't have all of those things.
Speaker B:And it makes it hard then to sift what is true from false.
Speaker B:And then you layer in these ideological arguments.
Speaker B: , you know, Starting in about: Speaker B:Research that has explored that has not found that there's there was any kind of systematic effort.
Speaker B: Analytica, coming out of the: Speaker B:They began to put in place stronger hate speech policies and fact checking policies.
Speaker B: course that grew through the: Speaker B: nd then when we came into the: Speaker B:One, it was Covid, and a lot of misinformation was spreading about COVID And then you also had these claims about election interference, especially by right leaning forces, including the President of the United States.
Speaker B:And those two major events challenged the platforms.
Speaker B:And at the time, those platforms then began to establish policies, deleting accounts, including Donald Trump's, for basically pushing false and misleading information.
Speaker B:And so what you see right now then is I think functionally kind of a retribution for those policies that were trying to clean up the information environment so that people, when they went to these social media platforms, had a good chance of getting information that was factual or at least was flagged if it had problems to it.
Speaker A:So when it comes to political campaigning, you've touched on this and obviously the information that people can access online is very algorithm driven.
Speaker A:So how has this echo chamber environment that sort of drives the news that people see and the information they get, how does that shape the way that political campaigns are now run?
Speaker B:So one thing I want to clarify is that the research shows that we don't actually really live in echo chambers.
Speaker B:So there was a lot of concern.
Speaker B: So again, the late: Speaker B:So people lived in these bubbles of information.
Speaker B:But as you know, we've really researched this, we have actually found that there's not even people who have very strong ideological identification.
Speaker B:So if you're a strong Democrat or a strong Republican, you tend to consume fewer news sources, but you're still exposed to a variety of different perspectives as you go about your day.
Speaker B:Now, that's not to say that there isn't self selection, that there's not sort of cognitive filtering that's going on.
Speaker B:So, for example, we have something called confirmation bias, this tendency to look for information that confirms our worldviews and ignore information that runs against it.
Speaker B:And so again, as you're going about your social media browsing day, if you see stuff that comes into your social media feed that you disagree with, you might just ignore it because it's not.
Speaker B:It doesn't speak to you ideologically.
Speaker B:Nevertheless, though.
Speaker B:So echo chambers, not so much.
Speaker B:Algorithms for sure.
Speaker B:Right?
Speaker B:That's one of the concerns that we've long held.
Speaker B:And there's when.
Speaker B:And of course, her name is not going to be in my head at the moment.
Speaker B: f documents coming out of the: Speaker B:Because the idea was that Facebook as a company, they want sticky content.
Speaker B:They want content that people want to see and will keep them engaged with the platform because that's how they sell eyeballs to advertisers, engaging content.
Speaker B:They want more people to see that engaging content.
Speaker B:Unfortunately, we also know that engaging content tends to be more outrageous, is more likely to be false.
Speaker B:So high emotionality, high likelihood for falsity, if it is highly engaging content.
Speaker B:And so their algorithms were unintentionally or intentionally, we don't know.
Speaker B:But they were probably unintentionally boosting false and misleading information.
Speaker B:And that is a function of the algorithms.
Speaker B:And there's research, actually, there was a set of studies that have come out that were funded by Facebook that found that it's a little controversial.
Speaker B:And I don't know if I want to unpack all the details, but in the end, what the research suggests is that Facebook, for example, does not increase extremism extreme perspectives.
Speaker B:It doesn't sort of promote more kind of, yeah, extreme thinking, for example, or polarization, affect depolarization, which is this tendency to not like the people who are from the other party.
Speaker B:But there's some controversy around that because it seems that when that research was done, Facebook actually changed their algorithms during the research period.
Speaker B:So that's a bit of a controversy.
Speaker B:All to say, though, that these social media platforms, yes, there's algorithms, yes, they shape the information environment that you are experiencing.
Speaker B:The effects however, are a little unclear.
Speaker B:And of course people aren't only on social media, right.
Speaker B:They're getting their news and their content from a variety of different sources, including still television, which we tend to not study very effectively.
Speaker A:Where, where I think perhaps, and please do, you know, completely prove me wrong here.
Speaker A:But where I think perhaps it gets tricky is when the content on a particular channel is no longer balanced.
Speaker A:Because you know, we see, and we've seen it for years, particularly on, on US TV where you know, news channels are either left or right.
Speaker A:You know, you've got your CNNs, you got your Foxes, you know, and people go to either one depending on their particular political or ideological leanings.
Speaker A:We're seeing the same pattern repeat in social media now where people go to X when they want pro Republican, pro Trump material.
Speaker A:They, they go now to Blue sky when they want something that's, that's not.
Speaker A:So the algorithms only really work when the content on the platform itself is balanced.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:Well, I guess what I would say is that you're 100% right, that the, I think we are seeing especially at the moment, some self selection.
Speaker B:That wasn't the case I would say in the last decade.
Speaker B:So you know, 10 years ago my sense of things is that it was a fairly more heterogeneous ideological environment.
Speaker B:So X was more heterogeneous.
Speaker B:Facebook, Facebook is still.
Speaker B:So in the U.S.
Speaker B:roughly 60% of adults regularly use Facebook, 40% of younger adults use Instagram.
Speaker B:X is still, I don't know, like the numbers of course have fluctuated a bit with takeover by Musk.
Speaker B:But the, the current number suggests about 19% of Americans are, are on X.
Speaker B:But I think that the, the demographics or the, not the demo.
Speaker B:Well, sure, the demographics, but also the kind of ideological perspectives have shifted and again we're now seeing some fragment media environment because as you mentioned, there's now Blue sky, there's Mastodon on the right, you have Gab Truth Social.
Speaker B:There's also now a right leaning YouTube alternative which is.
Speaker B:Shoot.
Speaker B:The name of it just came out of my head.
Speaker B:It'll come back.
Speaker B:Rumble and Rumble is the, the name of the right leaning YouTube environment.
Speaker B:So there are more social media platforms proliferating and they seem to have more of a kind of ideological drive.
Speaker B:The other thing to keep in mind too is that people use, we don't talk about this much, but people use different social media platforms to satisfy different social or entertainment or information needs.
Speaker B:Right?
Speaker B:So you know, you might go to Facebook because that's where you're in my case, where my high school friends are, or maybe again for younger generations, they go to Instagram because that's where their friends are.
Speaker B:They go to X because they want to see what the other side is saying.
Speaker B:If they're Democrats, or they go to X because they want to hear what their friends are saying.
Speaker B:They're kind of ideological friends on X.
Speaker B:And so you know that that's the other kind of complexity in this is people, most people on there have two to five different social media platforms that they're accessing on a regular basis.
Speaker B:So again, it makes for a very complex information environment.
Speaker B:My concern is that the fact that the platforms themselves have pulled away from regulation in the United States.
Speaker B:So Zuckerberg announced that he was going to follow Elon Musk's footsteps by shifting from fact checking to community notes, where the people who use the platforms decide what is or is not factually correct information.
Speaker B:That's deeply problematic because it will mean that more false and misleading information proliferates across the platforms.
Speaker A:And doesn't it also simply mean that majority rules?
Speaker A:You know, when you've got community driven moderation of content, then the, the people whose voice is biggest are the ones who will drive that moderation.
Speaker A:And all that really does is alienate the minority who will then leave the platform and invite in more people who align with the views of the majority who are moderating it.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, there's definitely that risk.
Speaker B:You know, there's also the problem that while people are debating whether or not something's factually misleading, the information's spreading.
Speaker B:It's not like there's a pause on the message as people debate whether or not it is factually correct or not.
Speaker B:But it's still out there spreading.
Speaker B:And, you know, the most that happens is the post gets amended with this community note if it follows the same structure that X does.
Speaker B:And, you know, there's some research that suggests that the public doesn't pay that much attention to those community notes.
Speaker B:And, you know, there is, we might all agree that the earth is not flat, but we don't all agree whether or not immigration is a good thing or not.
Speaker B:And so that's, you know, these more morally charged claims are where there is not going to be any real meaningful fact checking going on.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, it's certainly, certainly problematic and interesting to see how this is all going to play out over the next sort of minimum four years, really.
Speaker A:But I'd like to look at the commercial side of this for a second because one thing that Trump has done Phenomenally well, is harness the power of social media as a fundraising platform on a scale that I don't think any political candidate, not just in the U.S.
Speaker A:but anywhere, has really been able to do before.
Speaker A:He's raised hundreds of millions, if not billions through these channels.
Speaker A:So how is social media reshaping this sort of political fundraising landscape?
Speaker B:That's a great question.
Speaker B:So it's interesting because the Republicans have been, generally speaking, more pioneering when it comes to fundraising than the Democrats have been.
Speaker B: again, going Back in history,: Speaker B: was running for president in: Speaker B:He was president and was running for reelection in 96.
Speaker B:They both had websites, which at the time was incredibly novel.
Speaker B:They had email, although they didn't have email lists.
Speaker B:You couldn't really communicate with the campaigns other than to go to this static website.
Speaker B: In: Speaker B:He ran this kind of gimmicky tune in on the web to watch a stream video, which at the time was radical, this idea of streaming videos.
Speaker B:A lot of computers couldn't quite do it.
Speaker B:The Internet was still really slow, but broadband was starting to take off in cities through telephone lines.
Speaker B:And so people could have, or at least some people could actually watch video on their computers.
Speaker B:So he.
Speaker B:People signed up and in order to sign up to attend this, this online live video where you could ask questions of John McCain, he had to give a hundred bucks.
Speaker B:And it was incredibly successful.
Speaker B:And he experimented as well around the Iowa, sorry, the New Hampshire primaries.
Speaker B:That was his.
Speaker B:He really put a lot of his campaign effort into a second state that votes New Hampshire.
Speaker B:And again, he raised a lot of money in a very short window of time through small contributions.
Speaker B:Note too, this is when credit cards really start to take off as something that most people start to have.
Speaker B:And contributions online through a credit card, which was very controversial at the time because people were concerned about how secure it would be.
Speaker B:But nevertheless, he overcame those hurdles and people gave lots of money.
Speaker B:And it demonstrated that a candidate with the right message and the right timing could leverage small donor giving.
Speaker B:Because prior to that, and even during this time, most fundraising happened by having an event at a hotel ballroom, typically where people would spend a thousand dollars and they'd write a check and they'd eat some dried chicken at this event.
Speaker B:And that's how the campaign did most of their fundraising.
Speaker B:So large donor fundraising.
Speaker B:So McCain really unlocked small donor fundraising.
Speaker B: en Barack Obama came along in: Speaker B:He was the first candidate since changes to our campaign finance laws to basically not take federal funding for his political campaign because he had so much money from small donor contributions.
Speaker B: So after basically from: Speaker B:And, you know, some of it was gimmicky things.
Speaker B:The campaign set up stores on their website and they would hawk their kind of campaign wares to people.
Speaker B: of course, Trump has just, in: Speaker B:That was something that he tweeted about.
Speaker B:He ran ads on Facebook about his hat.
Speaker B:And he raised a lot of money selling that hat.
Speaker B:And of course, that's not all he did to fundraise, but that was.
Speaker B:Was at the time, somewhat novel.
Speaker B:And I just remembered Jeb Bush, one of the things he was selling on his campaign store was a guacamole bowl because his wife is from.
Speaker B:Is originally, I think, from Mexico.
Speaker B:And so the guacamole bowl, Trump had his hat.
Speaker B:So, like, these weird things.
Speaker B:And so what you see, like, again, over time, and Trump has been masterful at this sort of blurring the fundraising with selling of things in this.
Speaker B:This kind of weird.
Speaker B:If you buy, you know, this paraphernalia for your candidate, you know, you get to wear the hat or you wear the sweatshirt, and you kind of show your ideological alignment.
Speaker B:That's relatively novel in this current age.
Speaker B:And again, Trump has been masterful at that.
Speaker A:It brings into question this increasingly blurred intersection between commerce, politics and.
Speaker A:And the regulation that sits behind all of that, because it feels very much now like political campaigns are run like a business in how they fundraise.
Speaker A:But there surely has to be some control around that, doesn't there?
Speaker B:Oh, you optimist.
Speaker B:Well, so the regulations around campaign fundraising, campaign financing, campaign expenditures changed pretty radically.
Speaker B: Again, in the: Speaker B:And that was true for campaigns as well as for third party or political action groups were not candidates or parties, but our advocacy or interest groups.
Speaker B:And so we've seen this rise of political action committees, some of which are.
Speaker B:They're called super PACs or dark PACs, dark money PACs, where there's very little insight on who is fundraising these political action committees, and they can spend functionally unlimited amounts of money campaigning for candidates.
Speaker B:Similarly, there's no cap on the amount of money that canteen these days that campaigns can spend on their advertising, on their efforts to get elected.
Speaker B:There are caps on the amount of money they can raise from an individual directly.
Speaker B:But that really, in the face of the political action committees, it's meaningless.
Speaker B:So as a result, functionally, right now, we have a highly unregulated environment.
Speaker B:And of course, that's compounded by the fact that our campaigns last forever.
Speaker B: n, oh, I don't know, April of: Speaker B:So roughly, you know, 18 months of campaigning.
Speaker B:So if you are running for action for election, the amount of money at the presidential level you have to raise just to keep that messaging going all of those months is.
Speaker B:It's daunting, and it's a major issue.
Speaker B:You know, there's been some very thoughtful watchdogs highlighting the vulnerability that our election process has from, say, foreign entities because of these dark money groups and the lack of good transparency around who's contributing to campaigns and kind of, by extension, running ads in support of campaigns.
Speaker B:Again, going back to Elon Musk, that's one of the things that we unearthed and others in the final month of the presidential election is that Elon Musk spent hundreds of thousands of dollars funding some political action committees, which in turn funded other political action committees that ran deceptive advertisements on Facebook and Instagram, targeted, we think, to people who were susceptible to that deceptive messaging and functionally voted against their interests.
Speaker A:And this is where it.
Speaker A:To me, it kind of goes full circle here because we've spoken about how people are using social media now and how that's maybe becoming quite politicized.
Speaker A:And now we're sort of looking at the top of that process at people like Musk.
Speaker A:Well, he spent a lot of money to own a social media platform.
Speaker A:He then very publicly launched a pack to help fund Trump.
Speaker A:He also now has his hand in the executive branch in some weirdly undefined role.
Speaker A:I mean, when someone has that much control and that much involvement in every aspect of this, we have to start questioning the privacy, the safety and the risks that that poses to the individual users on these platforms, to the individual voters.
Speaker A:You know, should someone have that much power?
Speaker B:I don't think so, no.
Speaker B:I mean, when you have single individuals that have as much power as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, I want to post and nobody talks about Google, but Google is honestly hugely powerful in this space.
Speaker B:Google knows so much about us and they control the massive amount of the online advertising revenue and the kind of the holes that are filled, if you will, with advertising.
Speaker B:And, you know, Google flies under the radar in part because the CEOs are much less visible, unlike Musk and even unlike Zuckerberg, but they still incredibly powerful in terms of the data and knowledge that they have about ordinary people.
Speaker B:So, yes, I mean, I think functionally, when you have somebody like Elon Musk, who controls the social media platform, is an ideologue who now has some unclear, but nevertheless powerful role in government, it does raise questions about what are the implications for the public for people who speak up.
Speaker B:So, reporters, we're seeing a very clear effort by Trump during his campaign.
Speaker B:And now I think we'll see more of this with the new head of the Federal Communication Commission, which is the regulatory body that oversees the broadcast, the broadcast and cable networks.
Speaker B:I think we're going to see there's a high likelihood for additional pressure campaigns on journalists and on citizen journalists who are pushing messages that run counter to the messaging that the Trump administration and that Elon Musk wants.
Speaker B:We are fundamentally in unprecedented times, the United States, we have not experienced something like this before.
Speaker B:The Democratic backsliding, which is this idea in political science that democracies, some democracies kind of shift through political, legislative and not entirely legal maneuvers to establish more authoritarian governments.
Speaker B:And, you know, I, that we are sliding into authoritarianism as we speak right now in the United States.
Speaker B:And when you have somebody in power like Elon Musk, with the amount of data that he has about people, that's just the.
Speaker B: itch hunts that we saw in the: Speaker B:I think those sorts of witch hunts are probable for academics, journalists and other political activists who are pushing a message that is not in line with the current government ideology.
Speaker A:On that terrifying thought, what do you imagine the future to be when we look at this intersection between social media and politics?
Speaker B:I think in the end, and we'll see change if the public says enough, and I don't know what exactly that looks like.
Speaker B:We saw in this last election that the public was feeling, is feeling very financially stretched.
Speaker B:The economy has been very tough in the United States and ordinary people are having an incredibly hard time making ends meet.
Speaker B:The housing crisis is real.
Speaker B:Inflation has been quite painful.
Speaker B:Wages have not kept up, employment opportunities are stagn.
Speaker B:And so in that sort of malaise, I think that, from my perspective, is what explains to some extent why we saw Trump win and why we saw the Republican Party take the House and the Senate.
Speaker B:There are other explanations as well.
Speaker B:It's not one variable, it's a set of them.
Speaker B:But the ordinary people have to step up and say, you know what, actually, this isn't working.
Speaker B:This isn't what we want.
Speaker B:You know, privacy going back to something we're talking about.
Speaker B:Americans don't care that much about privacy.
Speaker B:Their attitude is generally, yeah, we care a little bit about it, but we recognize that that's just the cost of doing business if you want to have free Internet.
Speaker B:And so we don't have the kinds of regulations that exist in the European Union, for example, because the public doesn't care that much about it.
Speaker B:So it's a question whether or not the public is tolerant and open to the shift in the social media platforms, the role of Elon Musk, the kind of information environment we're going to experience with the shift in, again, fact checking and the policies around hate.
Speaker B:And I don't know, you know, when you are stretched, working two to three jobs a day, just trying to make ends meet, it's really hard to care about what's happening out there.
Speaker B:With Elon Musk, it's all just a bunch of noise.
Speaker B:And so that, for me, is going to be the tell.
Speaker B:If the public says, enough, this hurts, we don't want to do this anymore.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And I think you kind of hit the nail on the head there.
Speaker A:Certainly with the election we've just witnessed in the U.S.
Speaker A:trump was really able to tap into this basic need of, well, as long as there's food on the table, as long as there's a roof over my head, and it's cheaper to, to sort of provide all of that.
Speaker A:I really don't mind so much about all the other stuff.
Speaker A:And he really played on that and won the election.
Speaker A:And, I mean, you can't blame people.
Speaker A:But it does create a lot of question marks about the future direction of social media and the role that's going to play in politics.
Speaker A:Isn't it?
Speaker B:Very much.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:I think we are in unprecedented times.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:And we'll just have to see.
Speaker B:You know, I think one of the beauties of social media is that people do use it to organize and they do use it to share and coordinate.
Speaker B:And so I would predict that what we'll see is a kind of behind the scenes, grassroots, if you will, activism, organizing by people who don't want what we're currently seeing.
Speaker B:You see it, for example, in the Republican states that have pushed to end abortion access, that there is an underground movement of people, especially women, who are actively coordinating, supporting and pushing a set of messages that help correct false and misleading information, say, about abortion or various medical procedures or drugs.
Speaker B:So, you know, social media does have its upsides.
Speaker B:And as long as the Internet is still regulated like the telephone lines, in that they can't be controlled or closed off by the government or by companies, then we'll see people use or build new social media communication platforms that serve their needs.
Speaker A:Yeah, wise words to end our conversation and I think we're going to have to wrap it up there.
Speaker A:But no doubt over the next few years there's going to be a lot of twists and turns in the Trump Musk relationship and lots more to talk about.
Speaker B:I'm sure I will be very surprised if Elon Musk lasts a year.
Speaker A:Well, yeah, I mean, most people don't in the Trump administration, do they?
Speaker A:So I don't feel like that's too bold a prediction.
Speaker A:Jen, thank you so much for being our guest on this episode.
Speaker A:It's been really great to chat with you.
Speaker A:For anyone listening, if you do want to find out more about anything we've discussed, we've left some useful links in the show notes, notes.
Speaker A:So go and check those out.
Speaker A:Jennifer, if anyone wants to connect with you directly, where can they do that?
Speaker B:Right, That's a great question.
Speaker B:So I do still have an X account.
Speaker B:I'm not very active on it, but it's Prof.
Speaker B:Jsg P R O F as in professor jsg.
Speaker B:My my initials.
Speaker B:I am also on Blue sky same Prof.
Speaker B:JSG at Bluesky.
Speaker B:And yeah, otherwise you can find me on email.
Speaker B:Don't hesitate to send me a nice email or a thoughtful email.
Speaker B:I don't like keep email.
Speaker A:That is.
Speaker A:That is entirely fair.
Speaker A:You can also find me on on Bluesky.
Speaker A:I.
Speaker A:I've, I've abandoned X and you can also find me on LinkedIn.
Speaker A:So just search for my name if you do want to do so.
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