The 2016 Presidential election shook the foundations of American politics. Media reports immediately looked for external disruption to explain the unanticipated victorywith theories ranging from Russian hacking to fake news.
We have a less exotic, but perhaps more disconcerting explanation: Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world. This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.
While concerns about political and media polarization online are longstanding, our study suggests that polarization was asymmetric. Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites. But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.
Attacks on the integrity and professionalism of opposing media were also a central theme of right-wing media. Rather than fake news in the sense of wholly fabricated falsities, many of the most-shared stories can more accurately be understood as disinformation: the purposeful construction of true or partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core, misleading. Over the course of the election, this turned the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenged it. The prevalence of such material has created an environment in which the President can tell supporters about events in Sweden that never happened, or a presidential advisor can reference a non-existent Bowling Green massacre.
RELATED:Breitbart editor slams mainstream media in Pulitzer Hall
We began to study this ecosystem by looking at the landscape of what sites people share. If a person shares a link from Breitbart, is he or she more likely also to share a link from Fox News or from The New York Times? We analyzed hyperlinking patterns, social media sharing patterns on Facebook and Twitter, and topic and language patterns in the content of the 1.25 million stories, published by 25,000 sources over the course of the election, using Media Cloud, an open-source platform for studying media ecosystems developed by Harvards Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and MITs Center for Civic Media.
When we map media sources this way, we see that Breitbart became the center of a distinct right-wing media ecosystem, surrounded by Fox News, the Daily Caller, the Gateway Pundit, the Washington Examiner, Infowars, Conservative Treehouse, and Truthfeed.
Fig. 1: Media sources shared on Twitter during the election (nodes sized in proportion to Twitter shares).
Fig. 2: Media sources shared on Twitter during the election (nodes sized in proportion to Facebook shares).
The most frequently shared media sources for Twitter users that retweeted either Trump or Clinton.
Notes: In the above clouds, the nodes are sized according to how often they were shared on Twitter (Fig. 1) or Facebook (Fig. 2). The location of nodes is determined by whether two sites were shared by the same Twitter user on the same day, representing the extent to which two sites draw similar audiences. The colors assigned to a site in the map reflect the share of that sites stories tweeted by users who also retweeted either Clinton or Trump during the election. These colors therefore reflect the attention patterns of audiences, not analysis of content of the sites. Dark blue sites draw attention in ratios of at least 4:1 from Clinton followers; red sites 4:1 Trump followers. Green sites are retweeted more or less equally by followers of each candidate. Light-blue sites draw 3:2 Clinton followers, and pink draw 3:2 Trump followers.
Our analysis challenges a simple narrative that the internet as a technology is what fragments public discourse and polarizes opinions, by allowing us to inhabit filter bubbles or just read the daily me. If technology were the most important driver towards a post-truth world, we would expect to see symmetric patterns on the left and the right. Instead, different internal political dynamics in the right and the left led to different patterns in the reception and use of the technology by each wing. While Facebook and Twitter certainly enabled right-wing media to circumvent the gatekeeping power of traditional media, the pattern was not symmetric.
The size of the nodes marking traditional professional media like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, surrounded by the Hill, ABC, and NBC, tell us that these media drew particularly large audiences. Their color tells us that Clinton followers attended to them more than Trump followers, and their proximity on the map to more quintessentially partisan siteslike Huffington Post, MSNBC, or the Daily Beastsuggests that attention to these more partisan outlets on the left was more tightly interwoven with attention to traditional media. The Breitbart-centered wing, by contrast, is farther from the mainstream set and lacks bridging nodes that draw attention and connect it to that mainstream.
RELATED:10 tools to tackle common problems journalists face
Moreover, the fact that these asymmetric patterns of attention were similar on both Twitter and Facebook suggests that human choices and political campaigning, not one companys algorithm, were responsible for the patterns we observe. These patterns might be the result of a coordinated campaign, but they could also be an emergent property of decentralized behavior, or some combination of both. Our data to this point cannot distinguish between these alternatives.
Another way of seeing this asymmetry is to graph how much attention is given to sites that draw attention mostly from one side of the partisan divide. There are very few center-right sites: sites that draw many Trump followers, but also a substantial number of Clinton followers. Between the moderately conservative Wall Street Journal, which draws Clinton and Trump supporters in equal shares, and the starkly partisan sites that draw Trump supporters by ratios of 4:1 or more, there are only a handful of sites. Once a threshold of partisan-only attention is reached, the number of sites in the clearly partisan right increases, and indeed exceeds the number of sites in the clearly partisan left. By contrast, starting at The Wall Street Journal and moving left, attention is spread more evenly across a range of sites whose audience reflects a gradually increasing proportion of Clinton followers as opposed to Trump followers. Unlike on the right, on the left there is no dramatic increase in either the number of sites or levels of attention they receive as we move to more clearly partisan sites.
Sites by partisan attention and Twitter shares.
Sites by partisan attention and Facebook shares.
The primary explanation of such asymmetric polarization is more likely politics and culture than technology.
A remarkable feature of the right-wing media ecosystem is how new it is. Out of all the outlets favored by Trump followers, only the New York Post existed when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. By the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, only the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh, and arguably Sean Hannity had joined the fray. Alex Jones of Infowars started his first outlet on the radio in 1996. Fox News was not founded until 1996. Breitbart was founded in 2007, and most of the other major nodes in the right-wing media system were created even later. Outside the right-wing, the map reflects a mixture of high attention to traditional journalistic outlets and dispersed attention to new, online-only, and partisan media.
The pattern of hyper-partisan attack was set during the primary campaign, targeting not only opposing candidates but also media that did not support Trumps candidacy. In our data, looking at the most widely-shared stories during the primary season and at the monthly maps of media during those months, we see that Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Fox News were the targets of attack.
The first and seventh most highly-tweeted stories from Infowars.com, one of the 10 most influential sites in the right-wing media system.
The February map, for example, shows Fox News as a smaller node quite distant from the Breitbart-centered right. It reflects the fact that Fox News received less attention than it did earlier or later in the campaign, and less attention, in particular, from users who also paid attention to the core Breitbart-centered sites and whose attention would have drawn Fox closer to Breitbart. The March map is similar, and only over April and May will Foxs overall attention and attention from Breitbart followers revive.
This sidelining of Fox News in early 2016 coincided with sustained attacks against it by Breitbart. The top-20 stories in the right-wing media ecology during January included, for example, Trump Campaign Manager Reveals Fox News Debate Chief Has Daughter Working for Rubio. More generally, the five most-widely shared stories in which Breitbart refers to Fox are stories aimed to delegitimize Fox as the central arbiter of conservative news, tying it to immigration, terrorism and Muslims, and corruption:
The repeated theme of conspiracy, corruption, and media betrayal is palpable in these highly shared Breitbart headlines linking Fox News, Rubio, and illegal immigration.
As the primaries ended, our maps show that attention to Fox revived and was more closely integrated with Breitbart and the remainder of the right-wing media sphere. The primary target of the right-wing media then became all other traditional media. While the prominence of different media sources in the right-wing sphere vary when viewed by shares on Facebook and Twitter, the content and core structure, with Breitbart at the center, is stable across platforms. Infowars, and similarly radical sites Truthfeed and Ending the Fed, gain in prominence in the Facebook map.
October 2016 by Twitter shares
October 2016 by Facebook shares
These two maps reveal the same pattern. Even in the highly-charged pre-election month, everyone outside the Breitbart-centered universe forms a tightly interconnected attention network, with major traditional mass media and professional sources at the core. The right, by contrast, forms its own insular sphere.
The right-wing media was also able to bring the focus on immigration, Clinton emails, and scandals more generally to the broader media environment. A sentence-level analysis of stories throughout the media environment suggests that Donald Trumps substantive agendaheavily focused on immigration and direct attacks on Hillary Clintoncame to dominate public discussions.
Number of sentences in mainstream media that address Trump and Clinton issues and scandals.
Coverage of Clinton overwhelmingly focused on emails, followed by the Clinton Foundation and Benghazi. Coverage of Trump included some scandal, but the most prevalent topic of Trump-focused stories was his main substantive agenda itemimmigrationand his arguments about jobs and trade also received more attention than his scandals.
Proportion of election coverage that discusses immigration for selected media sources.
While mainstream media coverage was often critical, it nonetheless revolved around the agenda that the right-wing media sphere set: immigration. Right-wing media, in turn, framed immigration in terms of terror, crime, and Islam, as a review of Breitbart and other right-wing media stories about immigration most widely shared on social media exhibits. Immigration is the key topic around which Trump and Breitbart found common cause; just as Trump made this a focal point for his campaign, Breitbart devoted disproportionate attention to the topic.
Top immigration related stories from right wing media shared on Twitter or Facebook.
What we find in our data is a network of mutually-reinforcing hyper-partisan sites that revive what Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style in American politics, combining decontextualized truths, repeated falsehoods, and leaps of logic to create a fundamentally misleading view of the world. Fake news, which implies made of whole cloth by politically disinterested parties out to make a buck of Facebook advertising dollars, rather than propaganda and disinformation, is not an adequate term. By repetition, variation, and circulation through many associated sites, the network of sites make their claims familiar to readers, and this fluency with the core narrative gives credence to the incredible.
Take a look at Ending the Fed, which, according to Buzzfeeds examination of fake news in November 2016, accounted for five of the top 10 of the top fake stories in the election. In our data, Ending the Fed is indeed prominent by Facebook measures, but not by Twitter shares. In the month before the election, for example, it was one of the three most-shared right-wing sites on Facebook, alongside Breitbart and Truthfeed. While Ending the Fed clearly had great success marketing stories on Facebook, our analysis shows nothing distinctive about the siteit is simply part-and-parcel of the Breitbart-centered sphere.
And the false claims perpetuated in Ending the Feds most-shared posts are well established tropes in right wing media: the leaked Podesta emails, alleged Saudi funding of Clintons campaign, and a lack of credibility in media. The most Facebook-shared story by Ending the Fed in October was ITS OVER: Hillarys ISIS Email Just Leaked & Its Worse Than Anyone Could Have Imagined. See also, Infowars Saudi Arabia has funded 20% of Hillarys Presidential Campaign, Saudi Crown Prince Claims, and Breitbarts Clinton Cash: Khizr Khans Deep Legal, Financial Connections to Saudi Arabia, Hillarys Clinton Foundation Tie Terror, Immigration, Email Scandals Together. This mix of claims and facts, linked through paranoid logic characterizes much of the most shared content linked to Breitbart. It is a mistake to dismiss these stories as fake news; their power stems from a potent mix of verifiable facts (the leaked Podesta emails), familiar repeated falsehoods, paranoid logic, and consistent political orientation within a mutually-reinforcing network of like-minded sites.
Use of disinformation by partisan media sources is neither new nor limited to the right wing, but the insulation of the partisan right-wing media from traditional journalistic media sources, and the vehemence of its attacks on journalism in common cause with a similarly outspoken president, is new and distinctive.
Rebuilding a basis on which Americans can form a shared belief about what is going on is a precondition of democracy, and the most important task confronting the press going forward. Our data strongly suggest that most Americans, including those who access news through social networks, continue to pay attention to traditional media, following professional journalistic practices, and cross-reference what they read on partisan sites with what they read on mass media sites.
To accomplish this, traditional media needs to reorient, not by developing better viral content and clickbait to compete in the social media environment, but by recognizing that it is operating in a propaganda and disinformation-rich environment. This, not Macedonian teenagers or Facebook, is the real challenge of the coming years. Rising to this challenge could usher in a new golden age for the Fourth Estate.
The election study was funded by the Open Society Foundations U.S. Program. Media Cloud has received funding from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Open Societies Foundations.
See original here:
- Green with Envy | How to Spot an Eco-Snob | Part III - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- EcoLogo - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- 5 Ways to Green Your Exercise Routine - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Seed Bombs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Guerrilla gardening - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Green Your Morning Routine - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Environmental Benefits of Telecommuting - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Safeway Sponsors Portland Community Cleanup - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Electric Vehicle Race - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Portland Bridge Pedal 2009 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- E-waste in Oregon - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Bike Sharing in Portland - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Bucks for the Bay Challenge - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Drive to Make a Difference with MyMPG - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Bathroom Sprayers - Green your Toilet Routine - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ubuntu OS can Save Energy - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Green Metropolis, David Owen - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Sustainable Pens: GLO Pens - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- International Day of Climate Action - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Donate to Oregon Toxics Alliance - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Biomass Energy Generation Myths - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Crude The Real Price of Oil | Playing in Portland - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Pictures From 350 Climate Day in Portland - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Arcimoto Electric Vehicles in Oregon - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Urban Rooftop Wind Turbines - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Chromium 6 Emissions from ESCO in Portland - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Food Inc. Review - December 19th, 2009 [December 19th, 2009]
- Making Maps with Google Earth and Google Maps by Shane Bradt of the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension - March 23rd, 2010 [March 23rd, 2010]
- Demonstration of Miradi 3.1 by Nick Salafsky of Foundations of Success - March 23rd, 2010 [March 23rd, 2010]
- Advanced Mashups – KML and the Mapping API by Cary Chadwick of the University of Connecticut Center for Land Use Education and Research - March 23rd, 2010 [March 23rd, 2010]
- Demonstration of InVEST by Heather Tallis of the Natural Capital Project - March 23rd, 2010 [March 23rd, 2010]
- GIS Maps Online by Emily Wilson of the University of Connecticut Center for Land Use Education and Research - March 23rd, 2010 [March 23rd, 2010]
- From ArcGIS to Web Maps: Simple Techniques for Publishing GIS Maps Online by Emily Wilson of the University of Connecticut Center for Land Use Education and Research - March 25th, 2010 [March 25th, 2010]
- Demonstration of Marine InVEST by Anne Guerry of the Natural Capital Project - March 31st, 2010 [March 31st, 2010]
- Eliminate and Decrease Styrofoam - March 31st, 2010 [March 31st, 2010]
- Portland Plans to Spend $600 million on Master Bike Plan - April 2nd, 2010 [April 2nd, 2010]
- (Webinar in Spanish) Demostración sobre Vista 2.5 de NatureServe en línea (Webinar) por Ian Varley, Carmen Josse, y Alexandra Sanchez de Lozada de NatureServe. - April 6th, 2010 [April 6th, 2010]
- Using and Adding Your Content to Google Ocean by Charlotte Vick, Google Content Manager of Mission Blue - April 13th, 2010 [April 13th, 2010]
- End Paper Receipts - May 1st, 2010 [May 1st, 2010]
- Demonstration of CanVis by Chris Haynes of NOAA Coastal Services Center - May 6th, 2010 [May 6th, 2010]
- Demonstration of HD.gov Web Portal by Jeff Adkins from NOAA Coastal Services Center - May 13th, 2010 [May 13th, 2010]
- Demonstration of Ecosystem Assessment and Reporting Tool by Steve Schill of The Nature Conservancy - May 13th, 2010 [May 13th, 2010]
- Demonstration of Version 2.0 of the Multipurpose Marine Cadastre by Adam Bode and Brian Smith of NOAA Coastal Services Center - May 17th, 2010 [May 17th, 2010]
- CRUDE Filmmakers Subpoenaed by Chevron - May 22nd, 2010 [May 22nd, 2010]
- Demonstration of the Digital Coast Coastal Inundation Toolkit by Steph Beard, Jodie Sprayberry and Billy Brooks of NOAA Coastal Services Center - May 25th, 2010 [May 25th, 2010]
- Presentation on the Creating Resilient Communities EBM Tool Demonstration Project by Jocelyn Hittle of PlaceMatters - June 10th, 2010 [June 10th, 2010]
- Presentation on Economic Data Needed for EBM by Linwood Pendleton of Duke University - October 11th, 2010 [October 11th, 2010]
- Recycling Water - October 16th, 2010 [October 16th, 2010]
- ODOT Partners with Oregon Toxics Alliance to Reduce Pesticides - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- Goats Hired to Mow Portland Lot - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- A World of Health: Connecting People, Place, and Planet - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- Alternative Recycling Options - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- No More Bullying the Bull Trout - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- 1000+ EV Charging Stations Slated for Oregon I-5 Corridor - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- The Vertical Farm Concept - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- Blog Action Day 2010 | Water - October 17th, 2010 [October 17th, 2010]
- Eco Districts - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Will The Nissan Leaf Thrive? - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- A Green Railroad - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Biomass is not Oregon's clean-energy future as currently promoted - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Electrified Parking Spaces - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Tree Planting - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Three Tips to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint and Live Longer. - October 24th, 2010 [October 24th, 2010]
- Biomass is not Oregon’s clean-energy future as currently promoted - October 31st, 2010 [October 31st, 2010]
- Rail~Volution - October 31st, 2010 [October 31st, 2010]
- Green Streets Initiative - October 31st, 2010 [October 31st, 2010]
- Mayor Kitty Piercy and Envision Eugene - November 7th, 2010 [November 7th, 2010]
- The Willamette River Transit Bridge - November 13th, 2010 [November 13th, 2010]
- Collaborative Learning and Land Use Tools to Support Community Based Ecosystem Management by Chris Feurt of the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve - November 14th, 2010 [November 14th, 2010]
- Portland Federal Building Begins Green Makeover - November 14th, 2010 [November 14th, 2010]
- Vestas’ New HQ in Portland Shoots for LEED Platinum - November 14th, 2010 [November 14th, 2010]
- College Degrees to Get You in the Environmental Field - November 14th, 2010 [November 14th, 2010]
- Demonstration of openNSPECT, an Open Source Version of the Nonpoint-Source Pollution and Erosion Comparison Tool by Dave Eslinger of NOAA Coastal Services Center - February 14th, 2011 [February 14th, 2011]
- Demonstration of EMDS by Keith Reynolds of the US Forest Service - February 14th, 2011 [February 14th, 2011]
- Demonstration of Habitat Priority Planner by Chrissa Waite and Danielle Bamford of NOAA Coastal Services Center - February 14th, 2011 [February 14th, 2011]
- Presentation on the Coastal Adaptation to Sea Level Rise Tool (COAST) by Sam Merrill of the New England Environmental Finance Center - February 14th, 2011 [February 14th, 2011]
- Presentation on the Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard by Kathy Goodin of NatureServe - February 14th, 2011 [February 14th, 2011]
- Demonstration of Coral Reef Scenario Evaluation Tool (CORSET) by Jessica Melbourne-Thomas of the University of Tasmania - February 14th, 2011 [February 14th, 2011]
- Demonstration of Multi-scale Integrated Models of Ecosystem Services (MIMES) by Roel Boumans and David McNally of AFORDable Futures LLC - February 14th, 2011 [February 14th, 2011]
- Creating Life in the Desert - February 14th, 2011 [February 14th, 2011]