The tumult, conflict, and controversy of the 2016 presidential election continues to cast a dark cloud over the U.S. political landscape and has propelled attention to better understanding the role of social media and broader media systems in the spread of disinformation, in facilitating media manipulation and foreign interference, and in contributing to growing political polarization and enmity. Two recent books, Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President: What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Frenemies: How Social Media Polarized America by Jaime Settle, take on important portions of the current epistemic troubles viewed by many as threats to democracy.
In Cyberwar, Jamieson addresses the question of whether Russian influence operations played a decisive role in Trump’s 2016 victory election. The book opens by documenting the actions taken by the Russian government to interfere in the election and describes several mechanisms it used to influence U.S. voters in its efforts to help the Trump campaign. First, Russians produced and spread content over social media targeted at U.S. voters and purchased targeted social media advertising. Second, they hacked into the email accounts of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. (More details of the hacking and social media campaigns have since been covered in the Mueller report, though Jamieson’s accounting holds up well.) Jamieson also raises the possibility as reported in the press that FBI director James Comey’s public announcements related to the investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server for sensitive emails in July and October 2016, both of which damaged the Clinton campaign, were influenced by disinformation known to have been planted by Russia.
The core of Cyberwar is devoted to assessing the likely impact of Russian government interventions on the election results. Jamieson does not have a lot of direct evidence that voter attitudes and behaviors were influenced by Russian government intervention. Instead, she makes the case that there were plausibly sufficient levels of media effects from Russian government interventions to sway the decisions of just under 80,000 voters in three swing states. She draws on media scholarship related to agenda setting, framing, and priming while acknowledging that we should not take media effects for granted in an age in which audiences have many choices in media outlets and gravitate toward attitude-consistent outlets and like-minded online communities. Exposure to media is not enough to posit media effects. Jamieson argues, however, that the 2016 election was particularly conducive to those effects, given the large number of undecided voters in the final weeks of the election. She also points to the flood of related content in the final weeks of the campaign countering the short-lived nature of media effects. Her conclusion is that there were more than enough persuadable voters for the Russian efforts to have affected the outcome: a modest conclusion in terms of the electoral math but monumental in political and election security terms. Jamieson also makes clear that this conclusion cannot be stated with full certainty.
In writing about Russian social media intervention, she says, “If the same sorts of effects that scholars have documented in past elections occurred in 2016, particularly those produced by agenda setting, framing, two-step flow, weighting and peer influence, then the trolls’ messaging helped Trump and hurt Clinton as well” (p. 211). Jamieson is more convincing when describing the manner in which the hacked emails influenced media coverage, particularly in the last 30 days of the election, and the way these emails were used to reinforce and amplify the negative framing of Clinton by her political opponents as a self-serving, untrustworthy political insider. Jamieson details the extraordinary confluence of events on October 7, 2016, starting with the release of Access Hollywood tapes in which Trump is heard making lewd comments about women that were suggestive of sexual assault. Within the hour, hacked emails belonging to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, acquired illegally by Russian government agents and supplied to Wikileaks, were published. The same day, a memo was released by the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) indicating that they were confident that the Russian government was responsible for hacking into the DNC servers. Jamieson argues that the hacked Clinton campaign emails provided to Wikileaks by the Russian government helped the Trump campaign deflect much of the attention from the Access Hollywood tapes and pushed the ODNI announcement further down the agenda during these crucial weeks before the election. She links the media narrative around the hacked emails and the way they factored into the debates with declining support for Clinton in October.
Jamieson’s criticism of the media is scathing. She describes in lurid detail the many ways in which members of the press distorted the content of the emails by eliding the full context of phrases such as “open borders,” their eagerness to cover the content of the hacked emails, and their failure to emphasize to the electorate that these emails were obtained illegally by the Russian government in order to influence the election, instead often applying the neutral-sounding label, “Wikileaks emails.”
In Frenemies, Settle zooms in on the narrower question of whether the use of Facebook leads to greater polarization among users. She argues that the design and affordances of the platform serve up information in a way that is uniquely conducive to fostering negative feelings and misperceptions of users from the opposing party.
The central argument in this book is that political information embedded in social relationships is more potent and that Facebook users are exposed to a rich set of social cues that facilitate the formation of negative feelings about outgroup members and lead to misperceptions that overestimate both the extremity of outgroup political views and the popularity of ingroup views: “Facebook facilitates people in making biased evaluations of the beliefs of other people, and using the site gives people practice in mapping social and political identities in stereotyped ways” (p. 236).
In the first chapter, Settle describes two types of polarization that she bundles together under the term “psychological polarization”: affective polarization, which is often expressed as negative feelings toward outgroup members, and perceived or false polarization, the tendency to exaggerate the coherence and extremity of the views of outgroup members. Building on a description of the role of the Facebook News Feed in users’ lives, Settle develops a theoretical model that links the affordances of Facebook to psychological polarization and that can be used to generate testable assertions. The framework is informed by insights about Facebook News Feed as “a personalized, quantified blend of politically informative expression, news, and discussion that is seamlessly interwoven in a single interface with non-political content” (p. 15). The core of the book describes a series of survey-based studies used to assess whether the predicted patterns of polarization associated with Facebook use are supported.
Settle asserts that Facebook use does more than reinforce users’ political identity: it allows people to recognize the political identity of others based on both the political and nonpolitical content they post and thereby to learn the political views of others, which they would not discover without Facebook. This then leads people to overestimate the level of ideological extremity in outgroups and to inflate the popularity of their views among others. She ties these behavioral responses to the affordances of Facebook, which include tools for identity expression, mixing of social and political content, amplification of opinion leaders, deceptive quantification of content, immediate social feedback, and frequent promotion of inflammatory content. Settle argues that viewing political content on Facebook in an environment rich with social cues and implicitly political content, much of it coming from like-minded users and a good portion of it designed to inflame intergroup divides, helps strengthen emotional responses tied to social identity.
The multistage research design, which is based on a series of surveys, offers primary evidence that supports the predictions of the polarizing effects of Facebook use. Of particular note, Settle persuasively argues that social media has a greater impact on those who are less politically engaged: not those doing the talking but those who are listening.
A limitation of the study is that the methodology does not offer direct evidence of causality, which Settle readily acknowledges. Additionally, many of the conclusions rely on polarization being a product of Facebook use, not the other way around, an issue addressed in the book but one that will likely be subject to further research and scrutiny. As Settle points out, we are missing observations of individuals becoming more polarized with Facebook use that would offer strong corroboration of her argument. Despite the limitations of the book, however, Frenemies represents the most comprehensive articulation and treatment of the polarizing impact of social media use available and should be essential reading for scholars who delve into this issue.
Both Cyberwar and Frenemies are excellent contributions to the field. They are intellectually honest in the inferences that can be drawn and the remaining points of uncertainty. Cyberwar is more accessible to a broad audience, whereas Frenemies will appeal primarily to academic audiences. Jamieson’s book is ultimately a description of the multiple points of vulnerability at the nexus of media, democracy, and intentional media manipulation, pointing out those who unwittingly helped Russian efforts, including the press, social media platforms, the citizenry, candidates, and “polarizers” who exacerbate social and political divides. Settle’s book points to media vulnerabilities to polarization that stem from human psychology and the architecture of social media, which may open us up to both intentional and inadvertent misperceptions. Both books motivate and pave the way for further research and highlight the challenges researchers face in establishing causal relationships in studying digital media consumption and political beliefs.
