Making Up Political People: How Social Media Create the Ideals, Definitions, and Probabilities of Political Speech' by
Mike Ananny in (2020) 4
Georgetown Law Technology Review 351 comments
Especially in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, there is increasing debate about how and why to regulate political speech posted on social media platforms, and whether such regulation is possible or desirable. Initially, such debates focused on the concept, production, and circulation of “fake news.” As politicians like President Trump co-opted the term to attack journalists and insulate themselves from criticism, and as academics argued against the term’s imprecision, historical complexity, and political weaponization, this term fell out offavor. In lieu of discussing “fakenews,” scholars and public commentators gradually began talking about the role that “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “computational propaganda” play in public discourse.
Rarer, though, in debates about how to name and trace this problematic class of speech are more fundamental conversations about what type of public life is presumed or desired. More precisely: What types of public life does such a focus on truth or falsity take for granted, and what type of public life is created by focusing on the truth or falsity of information? While many scholars assume the existence of “fake news” as a powerful political phenomenon and focus on its spread, effects, and defenses, others have questioned the “myth of the attentive public” that fake news ostensibly harms, reminded us of persuasion campaigns’ minimal effects, and questioned why scholars seem to be focusing on questions of information quality and circulation instead of longstanding political issues like race, class, and identity.
In this Paper, I want to depart slightly from scholarship that frames debates about contemporary, online political speech in terms of information, persuasion, effects, or even identity and instead ask: What assumptions do platform infrastructures make about public life, and what alternative forms of public life to do those assumptions foreclose? I focus on these infrastructures not because I see them as simple channels for delivering content that sways minds or elections, but because they are simultaneously instrumental and symbolic. Yes, they expose audiences to content, but they also serve as powerful sociotechnical imaginaries: “Collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures” enacted through often invisible technologies.
Science and Technology Scholars often focus on the significance and power of built infrastructures—information systems and social arrangements that create the conditions under which collective meanings and public life are made. In the same tradition I posit that today's
dominant view of online political speech — and the dominant critiques thereof — rests on three largely unquestioned assumptions. Firstly, citizens are information processors and publics are information products. Secondly, public life rests on taken-for-granted categories that social media platforms have a vested interest in creating, naturalizing, and policing. Lastly, much of political speech is governed by largely invisible logics of probability that platforms use to justify a scale of data that their business models require.
To develop this argument and ground this critique, I focus on a partnership that Facebook formed with five U.S. news and fact-checking organizations in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork with key partnership participants, I show how this partnership was a form of political speech infrastructure that assumes an “information ideal” of citizenship, that rests upon proprietary and computed categories of political speech, and that uses probability as a tool to govern speech and as a rhetorical defense against the power of Facebook’s scale.
Although a complete discussion of the concept is beyond the scope of
this Paper, I use the term “infrastructure” in the tradition of Science and
Technology Scholars who largely define it as an often invisible set of
relationships among people and materials (e.g., algorithms and databases) that
create the conditions under which sociotechnical systems are seen to be working or failing. In addition to the more formalised rules that govern organizations’ and people’s use of technologies, these relationships create the tacit norms, taken-for-granted practices, collective rhythms, shared terminology, and agreed-upon roles that make complex systems — from transport systems and power plants to advertising algorithms and sensor networks—seem stable, predictable, governable, and even boring. When such infrastructures are “inverted” — when the usually invisible relations among their human and nonhuman actors are traced and analyzed — it becomes possible to see how information systems are actually precarious, achievements that require a great deal of negotiation, coordination, and compromise. Infrastructures are anything but natural. They could be driven by different relationships, different definitions, and different tradeoffs. At any given moment, an infrastructure’s form and function emerge from subtle and complex negotiations among people and machines, many of whom are not consciously aware of or reflecting upon the types of power, language, expertise, and values that are keeping their infrastructures alive. In light of Latour’s claim that “technology is society made durable,” the concept of infrastructure becomes a way of (a) seeing technology as intertwined, mutually defining relationships between people and materials, and (b) asking which other societies might be possible, if only we had different relationships and different technologies.
Increasingly, scholars are using such an infrastructural lens to understand information work — everything from elections, earthquakes, canals, and space exploration, to press freedom, artificial intelligence, and fact checking. This way of seeing technologies focuses little on the “effects” that media have on people. Instead, such an approach cares more about what kind of social, cultural, and public worlds are created though intertwined people and objects. In this vein, I not only claim that Facebook’s partnership with news organizations can best be seen as infrastructural, I also want to read this infrastructure for the assumptions it makes about what public life is and should be.
