This essay’s “clickbait” title demands explanation. Readers who have been attentive to the politics of cyberspace may recognize that such “curiosity gap” headlines, once prolific, are already passé. The most vigilant activist organizations, keen to secure and sustain the attention and resources of their online clients, have adopted new tactics. Cyberspace is a quickly evolving world that rewards innovation and adaptation. Digital politics plies these fast-moving waters. Staying afloat is no easy feat given the fickle predilections and short attention spans of cyber citizens.

Social media are Internet-based platforms that facilitate the creation and exchange of user-generated content employing mobile or Web-based technologies. They are the most popular feature of the Internet, with the majority of its users employing social networking sites such as Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram, content sharing sites such as YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, and platforms such as Twitter, Sina Weibo, and a host of other non-English-language options. The contents of social media increasingly feed traditional media outlets, such as radio, television, and print. And in the United States, a majority of the public employ social media for their news and to participate in political discussions or events, with young adults more likely to engage in political activity online than any other way. The Pew Research Center (Internet and Technology) tracks these trends, which demonstrate the steadily rising impact of social media on social and political life (http://www.pewinternet.org/).

Three overarching concerns animate most scholars who survey the landscape of digital politics. First, can social media secure and sustain commitments, and what is their impact on political life? Second, do online politics serve as a gateway to other forms of political participation or a replacement for them? And third, do social media inform and enlighten citizens or transform them into misinformed, polarized, and manipulated masses?

The impact of social media on political life cannot be gainsaid, and its potential for mobilization is patent. Consider a few examples. When Malala Yousafzai, a blogging advocate for girls’ education, was shot in October 2012 by Taliban militants on her way home from school in Pakistan, she quickly became one of the most famous teenagers in the world. By 2014, Yousafzai had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest recipient to date. Social media were largely responsible for her meteoric rise to global prominence, which was aided by supportive tweets from Western celebrities.

Or consider the “Je suis Charlie” phenomenon. On January 7, 2015, two Islamist gunmen killed 10 staff members and two policemen at the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo in retaliation for the magazine’s cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. That evening, hundreds of thousands marched under “Je suis Charlie” signs in solidarity with the slain journalists. By the following afternoon, the slogan had appeared 3.4 million times as a Twitter hashtag. Three days later, 2 million gathered in Paris, with nearly 4 million joining demonstrations across France. And the solidarity went global. Such is the power of social media.

Mostly leaderless, spontaneous uprisings have erupted worldwide facilitated by digital coordination. These include Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution” in early 2011, leading to the ouster of longtime president Ben Ali and a democratization of the country, along with the subsequent uprisings of the Arab Spring; the mid-2011 Occupy Wall Street protests and Spain’s Movimiento 15-M, which rallied against unemployment, welfare cuts and corruption; the 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations in Istanbul and across Turkey focusing on freedom of the press and assembly, and the Brazilian Spring of the same year, with protests against the lack of public services (transport), corruption, and police brutality; the “Umbrella Revolution” in Hong Kong of 2014 challenging electoral decisions, and the rise of the #BlackLivesMatter movement that same year in the United States (the hashtag has been used nearly 30 million times on Twitter); and the viral spread of the #MeToo movement beginning in 2017. Many of these protests have provoked policy and institutional responses and generated widespread changes to political culture.

While digital politics may prompt otherwise uninvolved individuals to step onto the ladder of engagement, most never climb very high. Politics is difficult, frustrating work: the slow boring of hard boards, as Max Weber once said. It is far easier to tap blinking buttons on the ground floor of cyberspace. The phenomenon of “clicktivism,” occasionally dubbed “slacktivism,” refers to political participation that is restricted to such activities as signing online petitions; “liking” candidates, stories, or events on Facebook; forwarding Tweets; or donating a few dollars to a crowd-funded cause. Some worry that it is supplanting the sustained, face-to-face building of relationships that has been the mainstay of traditional political activism. In its stead, clicktivists engage in virtue signaling aimed at gaining acknowledgment of their ethical or political convictions from the like-minded.

Clicktivism has been compared to a sugar rush. Real political engagement is like eating your vegetables. Even if digital politics has the effect of increasing and invigorating political activity, it may not produce the enduring allegiances and organization needed to translate aspirations into results. While leaderless protesters may have been responsible for ousting Hosni Mubarak in Egypt’s “Facebook revolution,” it was the well-organized Muslim Brotherhood that gained power in the first election, and the Egyptian military, also well-organized with strong leadership, that subsequently ousted the democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, who had the support of the Muslim Brotherhood. Likewise, the Occupy Wall Street movement, much abetted by social media, is often derided as a near-meaningless flash in the pan because it spurned the organization needed to achieve lasting results.

Consider the case of the advocacy group Invisible Children, whose video addressing the human rights abuses of Ugandan militant Joseph Kony went viral. With more than 80 million views and millions of Tweets following its launch, “Kony 2012” became the most watched video of all time. In short order, it also became a prime example of the futility of clicktivism, as Invisible Children dissolved two years after its unprecedented viral success, with Kony still at large.

Likewise, the 2014 hashtag campaign #BringBackOurGirls prompted Michelle Obama, the first lady, along with the pope, to support efforts to curtail the human rights abuses of Boko Haram, the Nigerian jihadist organization that kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from the region of Chibok earlier that year. Dozens managed to escape, and over the years about a hundred more girls were freed. But an equal number remained in captivity four years after #BringBackOurGirls went viral. At one point, Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau indicated that he was pleased with the hype. Analysts observe that social media attention may have enhanced Boko Haram’s public relations campaign and its negotiating power with the Nigerian government.

Social media are frequently derided as convenient means for self-gratifying participation in trending issues and ideological boosterism. As such, they may lead to an increasingly polarized and misinformed citizenry. Cass Sunstein (Reference Sunstein2007) speaks of the online echo chambers that allow digital citizens to limit their ethico-political intake to The Daily Me. Likewise, Eli Pariser (Reference Pariser2012) warns of the “filter bubbles” that ensconce cyberspace residents. Still, evidence is weak that online communities are more self-enclosed than offline ones, and that social media are more blinkered and ideologically self-serving than conventional media (think talk radio). To be sure, social media can reinforce identity-based polarization that is largely immune to reasoned engagement with those of different convictions. But online activities can also foster a vivid exchange of viewpoints within otherwise depoliticized social spheres and bring disengaged citizens, especially youth, into political life.

Whether digital politics on the whole stimulates, supplements, corrupts, complements, or crowds out more traditional forms of political participation is as yet unknown. One thing is clear: It has transformed the political landscape. The three books reviewed here address these developments and concerns. While significantly overlapping in their source materials and themes, they are more complementary than replicative. Taken together, they address the when, why, who, what, and how of digital politics.

Joel Penney’s The Citizen Marketer tackles the when and why of online politics, examining its rise in the context of citizens’ historical deployment of various means and methods to advertise their ideological leanings and share their political endorsements. He also provides an interpretation of online behavior, suggesting why activists do what they do. Political Turbulence, by Helen Margetts and her coauthors, addresses the who and what of digital politics. For this interdisciplinary team of scholars, digital politics is a form of collective action that benefits from the distinct advantages conferred by social media. The authors also provide illuminating insights into the personality types of the activists involved, as different sorts of people are amenable to different forms of online mobilization. David Karpf’s Analytic Activism goes behind the scenes to describe how digital politics is tactically developed through the sophisticated use of Big Data and the rigorous testing of online tactics.

For Penney, citizen marketers exercise “promotional power as microlevel, peer-to-peer agents” (p. 28) and “curatorial agency” (p. 31) as amplifiers of political content. Whether sporting buttons, tattoos, or T-shirts in their role as walking billboards, or forwarding Tweets and liking events and stories on Facebook, citizens act as “microlevel publicity agents who work on behalf of their favored political causes, organizations, and figures in the trenches of the attention economy” (p. 136). While concerned about the polarization, trivialization, and manipulation associated with digital politics, Penney is mostly enthusiastic about citizens playing the role of brand advocates exploiting opportunities to spread ideas, viralize memes, and digitally market their political predilections.

The strength of Penney’s book is its historical contextualization of political activism, moving readers beyond a focus on digital technology per se to the broader social and cultural phenomena of citizens advertising their political opinions. It is useful to see the “make love not war” buttons and T-shirts of the 1960s as not wholly distinct from the heraldic emblems carried aloft by bannermen in medieval times, or from the boosterism facilitated by contemporary social media.

The impact of citizen marketing, Penney observes, is difficult if not impossible to measure (p. 157). So he avoids the challenging task of assessing the extent to which citizen marketing translates into political agency. Instead, he interprets how citizens understand their activism and what this tells us about the changing political landscape. Quantitative analysis, he argues, cannot illuminate the “deep hermeneutic processes” and “complex processes of political identity formation” that are endemic to citizen marketing. Arguably, Penney himself does not go deep enough to access such processes well: His interpretative analysis is based on half-hour, semistructured interviews, half of which were conducted over the phone. The result is a number of heavily hedged bets, such as the claim that online political activity “may help invigorate popular democracy by casually injecting the political into the everyday spaces and places of popular culture” (p. 7; italics added) or that citizen marketing “potentially strengthens an agonistic rather than deliberative model of democracy” (p. 8; italics added). In turn, no criteria are provided to distinguish the citizen marketer from the “citizen propagandist” (p. 187).

Penney concludes: “For better or worse, the citizen marketer approach is here to stay, and the most productive path moving forward is to try to make it more introspective, more adaptive, more critically engaged and aware of its embedded power relations, and perhaps, ultimately, more meaningful” (p. 187). Who could be against greater introspection, adaptation, critical awareness, and meaning? Still, his bromide may simply be wrongheaded. One might likewise say that violent video games are here to stay, and so we should try to make them more compassionate and caring. But tenderhearted shoot-’em-ups would fail miserably in the marketplace. The better option might be for parents to limit the amount of time their children spend playing violent video games, and emphasize that while fantasy entertainment has its place, it must not replace the compassionate and caring engagements that make family life, friendships, and social community possible. Whether digital politics can be tweaked, and if, when, and how we should limit its reach, remain vexing questions.

Political Turbulence investigates the dynamics of online collective action. The authors—two political scientists, one physicist, and a computer scientist—highlight the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration. Their three-year study collected Twitter data relating to online petitions hourly and conducted randomized control trials with participants of the social media platform mySociety, who engaged in multiple rounds of collective-action challenges. The analysis of such large data sets and experiments illuminates the capacity of social media to induce citizens of various demographics and personality types to contribute “micro-donations” of time, effort, or money.

Most petition efforts grounded in social media quickly fail, while some—equally rapidly—give rise to viral drives, massive mobilizations, and occasional revolutions. Online petitions are fat-tailed rather than bell-curved, normal distributions. A “power law” dynamic is evident. Petitions that succeed benefit from a large number of new signatories in the first day or two, surpass a tipping point, and never look back. People visiting online petition sites tend to endorse a few trending issues, then quit for the day. A prominent “attention decay” is in play (p. 76).

The result is unpredictability and instability in the world of digital politics. Early popularity gained via social media—something difficult if not impossible to gauge or replicate—proves key to success. A quasi-Darwinian political ecology exists, with all but a few causes dying on the vine, while “a small number of unpredictable, extreme events [inject] turbulence into every area of politics” (p. 200). The model of democracy most aligned to this form of socially mediated politics is “turbulent” or “chaotic” pluralism.

Classic pluralism, as described by Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom, displayed stable, competing interest groups vying for influence on the institutions of state power. This has been replaced by a fractured process marked by rapid, unpredictable change. Here, a proliferation of dynamic identities and mobilizations unsettle traditional interest groups and statist politics. While Margetts and her colleagues identify inequality as a problem for this contemporary form of pluralism, they nonetheless deem the Internet, owing to its capacity to assist mobilization through vast numbers of microdonations, a “force for redistribution of power” (p. 216). The authors hope that the “ʻuniversal laws’ governing political turbulence” will be developed in the context of overarching theories (p. 227). Notwithstanding a passing reference (p. 224), however, they neglect to engage the extensive literature on complex adaptive systems, which would likely serve as the most powerful resource for further theorizations and empirical testing of the turbulent world of digital politics.

The authors address how social media produce a positive sense of group identity while shaming shirkers and free riders into action. Social information—knowledge about the number of neighbors, friends, peers, or fellow customers engaged in a certain behavior—increases participation. This tribal effect is grounded in the human tendencies to conformity, reciprocity, maintenance of social norms, and shame aversion. It is deployed extensively in social marketing, including community-based social marketing aimed at increasing environmentally friendly behavior such as recycling, conserving energy, and limiting consumption (McKenzie-Mohr Reference McKenzie-Mohr2011). The provision of social information via social media replicates for large and diffuse groups the social pressure that allows small groups, in line with classic collective-action theory, to effectively pursue public goods in the absence of selective incentives (p. 132).

Personality type, the authors discover, influences participation in collective action, with extroversion the strongest predictor of engagement (p. 162). Pro–social people (altruists) are least likely to participate when contributions are visible and social information is employed. They prefer anonymity. In contrast, pro-self-individuals (egoists) acting strategically and avoiding shame, participate more when their efforts are made visible. The conclusion is that organizations should deploy visibility and social information selectively. When trying to induce participation from pro-selfers with a tendency to free-ride—the example given is a group of city bankers—one should deploy visibility (p. 173). With Big Data analytics and the microtargeting of citizens based on social media activity playing an ever-larger role in mobilization, highly tailored, microtargeted campaigns grounded in the analysis of psychological data may be the way of the future. Obviously, the opportunities for manipulation are legion. Like it or not, we are entering the age of the digitally engineered citizen. Scholars hoping to better understand the dynamics and dangers of this age, the authors argue, should follow their lead by taking advantage of Big Data and conducting experiments employing social media (p. 214).

Karpf’s Analytic Activism grapples with the means by which political movement organizations stimulate and shape the online engagement and activities of citizens. It helps explain how the power law of digital politics develops. Analytic activism refers to the monitoring of sentiment and responsiveness, the testing and refining of communications, and the quantifying of opinion and engagement carried out by large, well-established advocacy groups. A key feature of analytics is A/B testing. A large group of Website visitors or email recipients will receive near-identical messages, with half the recipients exposed to a single variation—perhaps in the wording of the message or the shape, size, and color of the “button” that visitors click to receive more information. Response rates determine which version is more effective.

Analytics give an edge to organizations competing for visitors, supporters, and members in the increasingly crowded political marketplace. Organizations employing analytics know who their supporters are and what most activates them. The failure of the Kony 2012 effort, Karpf (p. 63) notes, resulted from Invisible Children’s not knowing who watched their viral video, even though someone at YouTube had the data. Consequently, the advocacy group could not reach out to its viewers to secure ongoing support. With such examples in mind, Karpf largely supports the “digital listening” that allows activist organizations to reach their supporters, understand their predilections, and channel their political engagements.

Karpf notes that the Obama presidential campaigns tested virtually everything to build larger email lists, recruit more volunteers, raise more money, and spend that money more effectively. It was a first in this regard. Now, analytics are de rigueur for national political campaigns and large advocacy groups. An organization with a thousand members might have little use or capacity for analytics. An organization with 10 million members cannot afford to do without them. As the online political realm is constantly in flux, “the capacity to experiment, learn, and retest is a critical advantage” (p. 17). Karpf observes that “[y]ou are what you measure” (p. 133), and the inability or unwillingness to measure, test, and adapt in the neo-Darwinian world of digital politics puts one in line for extinction.

The near-monopolistic power of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and other giants of the digital era is often attributed to the “network effect,” wherein the larger the base of existing clientele, the more appealing it is to new clients. But analytics also contribute to the growing power of large platforms. The “power of analytic activism increases with the size and scale of the activist organization that uses it. . . . All else being equal, bigger is better” (p. 129). Large and slow used to be synonyms, as was the case for dinosaurs and traditional business corporations. In the age of analytics, however, large means measurable and testable, and hence adaptable. In days gone by, the imperative of giving novelty-seeking customers what they wanted gave an edge to agile, upstart companies that could innovate, gain a toehold, and grow to exploit new niches. Now, larger organizations that engage in analytics have internal mechanisms for rapid innovation in the protean digital ecosystem.

Examples of organizations employing analytics that Karpf examines include Avaaz, Change.org, MoveOn.org, and Upworthy.com. These organizations are either left-progressive, or nonpartisan, and align well with Karpf’s own political leanings. That is a limitation of the book, but one partially justified by the topography of the political landscape of its time. Right-wing analytics, as practiced by the Trump campaign, had yet to become prominent. In this respect, Analytic Activism may have been written a few years too soon.

For some, “analytics” amounts to manipulation. Others equate the term with responsiveness and responsibility. As Karpf observes, “within the appropriate boundaries, it is certainly better to have institutions that listen than institutions that do not” (p. 28). Or, as a senior analytics staffer observed more vividly: “If you’re not looking at your data, then you’re not listening to your members. And that probably makes you kind of an asshole” (p. 11). In many respects, analytics is also a matter of institutional responsibility. Gut instincts regarding effective messaging are not very good (p. 110). This is true even for experts, who are often wrong but seldom in doubt. Arguably, it would be irresponsible to rely on intuition alone when the future of your organization is on the line. Analytics becomes the only responsible choice. In turn, analytics can be deployed to shape the goals, priorities, and strategic direction of an organization (p. 13), something carried out regularly by MoveOn.org. Likewise, the rePurpose program of the AFL-CIO applies the tactic of “gamification” to its political activities. Volunteers accumulate points through their contributions and use them to direct the flow of resources in AFL-CIO campaigns (pp. 154–57). Effectively, the organization gamifies its own governance. For some, this demeans the mission of a political organization. For others, it is democracy made digitally effective and engaging.

Notwithstanding forays into digital governance, Karpf acknowledges that “analytics” is, for the most part, “listening without conversation” (p. 161). As such, it may effectively crowd out traditional politics by rewarding quickly changing tactics rather than real conversations, relationship building, and mission-based strategies. Certainly, given the advantage that analytics bestows on large organizations, it may undermine community-based activism.

In turn, “big listening” conducted by governments and businesses can lead to privacy and rights infringements. And opportunities for manipulation, especially through the microtargeting of specific populations, are abundant. “There are plenty of cases where the use of analytics and algorithms deserves public outcry and policy response,” Karpf observes. “But we ought to calibrate our sense of outrage, directing it not at every use of A/B testing or trace data, but at the actors and activities that represent the real potential threats” (p. 57). Activist organizations, Karpf holds, are not major threats. Again, Analytic Activism may have been written a few years too soon.

Even if analytics stay in the hands of the right sort of people—an unlikely prospect—there are other problems to be confronted. Analytics will go where the data is to be found, and the availability of trace data, rather than a firm sense of mission, may warp the visions and strategies of advocacy groups (p. 127). The power of analytics pushes organizations to focus on the most easily tracked and quantified metrics of public sentiments and proclivities. But there is a distinction between people’s revealed preferences and their metapreferences: The former represent what “behavioral selves” do while the latter represents what “aspirational selves” want (p. 45). Analytics of revealed preferences indicate that most people are suckers for cat videos and watch them obsessively. Notwithstanding such tendencies, most people do not believe that watching felines frolic on YouTube all day is the best way to spend a life. Yet metapreferences, in line with aspirational selves, are constantly belied by the daily activities of behavioral selves. Analytics gauge revealed preferences, and steer organizations to exploit, and perhaps stimulate, them.

With this in mind, Karpf cautions against the use of “vanity metrics” that focus solely on the popularity of online offerings. Better to deploy analytic measurements and testing in tandem with expertise, good judgment, healthy debate, visionary leadership, and a firm sense of mission. Still, the forces aligned against such a measured approach are growing.

In “The End of Theory,” Chris Anderson (Reference Anderson2008), editor in chief of Wired, wrote: “Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves. . . . Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation. . . . Petabytes allow us to say: ‘Correlation is enough.’”^{Footnote 1} Karpf wants his readers to emerge from his study with a “tempered enthusiasm for analytic activism” (Analytic Activism, p. 176). At the end of the day, we do not want the numbers to speak for themselves, especially when these integers ignore citizens’ metapreferences. Still, his first chapter is entitled “Will the Revolution Be A/B Tested?” The answer is quite likely, and our aspirational selves may have very little to say about it.

Already in the late 1800s, consumer-oriented mass-marketing techniques were employed in U.S. elections. These intensified in the 1930s and were in full play by the time Dwight Eisenhower ran his “I Like Ike” presidential campaign against Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson lost, observing that “the idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal . . . is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process” (Citizen Marketer, p. 19). Recent elections suggest that Stevenson was wrong: The indignity suffered by the democratic process in an age of social media can go a good deal deeper. We have much to learn about digital politics, and the books reviewed here provide a good start. Whether scholars, statespeople, and citizens can learn quickly enough to avoid the greatest dangers of these churning waters, and make the most of opportunities, is unknown. Keeping democracy afloat will be no easy feat.