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Will truth be defeated? What can be done when 12 million Americans believe Obama is an alien lizard?

October 30, 2018

On February 12, 2014 the New Zealand Prime Minister proudly announced on TV that he could medically prove that he was not a …lizard.

Although this made everyone laugh, the sad truth is that he had to respond to a constitutional request of a citizen who demanded that the PM proved that he was not “a lizard alien in human shape trying to enslave the Human race”. And sadder even, he was not alone. In 2013, 4% of the US populations (that’s 12 million people), believed the alien lizard myth, and that Queen Elisabeth and Barack Obama were among them.

Funny?

If you draw a parallel with the myths and urban legends surrounding LGBTI people, it is not. “Abuse of children”, “witchcraft”, “demonization”, are just a few of the myths that are being used to persecute, and often kill, LGBT people. Hardly is there an earthquake that is not blamed on “gays”, in places as different as Italy, the USA, Haiti or more recently Indonesia.

From firm belief that planet Earth is flat, to certainty that HIV can be cured with garlic, there are countless urban legends and myths that resist all forms of argumentation.

Some campaigners will argue that it is education to rationality that will over time overcome legends and myths. But if education might be a necessary condition, it is by no mean sufficient. Actually, in a lot of cases the more educated people are the better they are equipped to justify their beliefs. Education might make it more difficult for people to hold crazy beliefs but once they do, they will use their education to cling to them even more.

That is one of the reasons why having our campaigns systematically target “people with higher education” might be something we should put serious research in, and not just assume that they are more progressive, or easier to convince.

Social research into human behavior has shown that people make their distinction between true and false, or right and wrong, on the basis of the group they (want to) belong to, and not on the basis of what they know is true. Hence religious dogma and “alternative facts”.

And with the choice of communications channels being more and more in the hands of the users (no more sitting in front of the 8 o’clock news), people live in a social bubble and the influence of the “in-group” is getting stronger and stronger.

Social media research shows that the bubbles are tighter than ever, with very little flow between opposing bubbles.

So your “truth” is unlikely to reach your target in the first place. And if it does, it is likely to be dismissed.

So is truth once and for all a loosing game?

“Providing information” and doing so on one’s Facebook page is definitely not the most effective thing to do when it comes to changing people, but there might be some other options to consider:

The most obvious move is of course to reach beyond your own “bubble” and identify the “bubbles” that are closest to you: the first tier. Human rights groups, women’s liberation forums, and all your natural allies.

But some of the “second tier” bubbles are harder to identify, although this is often where the biggest gains can be achieved. If you aim at early adopters of new trends, discussion forums on technological progress could be a good target. If you aim at young modern women, you might want to try discussion forums on fashion or modern lifestyle. When you know that a new series with an LGB or T character hits the net, it might be a better use of your time to participate in the discussions on mainstream discussion forums rather than on your own channels.

But even so, the basics of campaigns communication still apply and aggressively trolling these circles will be counterproductive, only alienating enemies even further. Communication has to be smartly framed, and this takes a bit of preparation.

Counter-intuitive as it may be, “truth” won’t change people.

If we want to have even a slight chance to change hearts and minds, we have to be good at becoming part of our target’s reference groups. And this requires going out of our bubbles and take the conversation where people are.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trolls attack from within : How we are all being manipulated from within our own communities

October 27, 2018

This article is reproduced from Medium.com

For researchers in online disinformation and information operations, it’s been an interesting week. On Wednesday, Twitter released an archive of tweets shared by accounts from the Internet Research Agency (IRA), an organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, with alleged ties to the Russian government’s intelligence apparatus. This data archive provides a new window into Russia’s recent “information operations.” On Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice filed charges against a Russian citizen for her role in ongoing operations and provided new details about their strategies and goals.

Information operations exploit information systems (like social media platforms) to manipulate audiences for strategic, political goals—in this case, one of the goals was to influence the U.S. election in 2016.

In our lab at the University of Washington (UW), we’ve been accidentally studying these information operations since early 2016. These recent developments offer new context for our research and, in many ways, confirm what we thought we were seeing—at the intersection of information operations and political discourse in the United States—from a very different view.

A few years ago, UW PhD student Leo Stewart initiated a project to study online conversations around the #BlackLivesMatter movement. This research grew to become a collaborative project that included PhD student Ahmer Arif, iSchool assistant professor Emma Spiro, and me. As the research evolved, we began to focus on “framing contests” within what turned out to be a very politicized online conversation.

Framing can be a powerful political tool.

The concept of framing has interesting roots and competing definitions (see Goffman, Entman, Benford and Snow). In simple terms, a frame is a way of seeing and understanding the world that helps us interpret new information. Each of us has a set of frames we use to make sense of what we see, hear, and experience. Frames exist within individuals, but they can also be shared. Framing is the process of shaping other people’s frames, guiding how other people interpret new information. We can talk about the activity of framing as it takes place in classrooms, through news broadcasts, political ads, or a conversation with a friend helping you understand why it’s so important to vote. Framing can be a powerful political tool.

Framing contests occur when two (or more) groups attempt to promote different frames—for example, in relation to a specific historical event or emerging social problem. Think about the recent images of the group of Central American migrants trying to cross the border into Mexico. One framing for these images sees these people as refugees trying to escape poverty and violence and describes their coordinated movement (in the “caravan”) as a method for ensuring their safety as they travel hundreds of miles in hopes of a better life. A competing framing sees this caravan as a chaotic group of foreign invaders, “including many criminals,” marching toward the United States (due to weak immigration laws created by Democrats), where they will cause economic damage and perpetrate violence. These are two distinct frames and we can see how people with political motives are working to refine, highlight, and spread their frame and to undermine or drown out the other frame.

In 2017, we published a paper examining framing contests on Twitter related to a subset of #BlackLivesMatter conversations that took place around shooting events in 2016. In that work, we first took a meta-level view of more than 66,000 tweets and 8,500 accounts that were highly active in that conversation, creating a network graph (below) based on a “shared audience” metric that allowed us to group accounts together based on having similar sets of followers.

“Shared Audience” Network Graph of Accounts in Twitter Conversations about #BlackLivesMatter and Shooting Events in 2016. Courtesy of Kate Starbird/University of Washington.

That graph revealed that, structurally, the #BlackLivesMatter Twitter conversation had two distinct clusters or communities of accounts—one on the political “left” that was supportive of #BlackLivesMatter and one on the political “right” that was critical of #BlackLivesMatter.

Next, we conducted qualitative analysis of the different content that was being shared by accounts on the two different sides of the conversation. Content, for example, like these tweets (from the left side of the graph):

Tweet: Cops called elderly Black man the n-word before shooting him to death #KillerCops #BlackLivesMatter

Tweet: WHERE’S ALL THE #BlueLivesMatter PEOPLE?? 2 POLICE OFFICERS SHOT BY 2 WHITE MEN, BOTH SHOOTERS IN CUSTODY NOT DEAD.

And these tweets (from the right side of the graph):

Tweet: Nothing Says #BlackLivesMatter like mass looting convenience stores & shooting ppl over the death of an armed thug.

Tweet: What is this world coming to when you can’t aim a gun at some cops without them shooting you? #BlackLivesMatter.

In these tweets, you can see the kinds of “framing contests” that were taking place. On the left, content coalesced around frames that highlighted cases where African-Americans were victims of police violence, characterizing this as a form of systemic racism and ongoing injustice. On the right, content supported frames that highlighted violence within the African-American community, implicitly arguing that police were acting reasonably in using violence. You can also see how the content on the right attempts to explicitly counter and undermine the #BlackLivesMatter movement and its frames—and, in turn, how content from the left reacts to and attempts to contest the counter-frames from the right.

Our research surfaced several interesting findings about the structure of the two distinct clusters and the nature of “grassroots” activism shaping both sides of the conversation. But at a high level, two of our main takeaways were how divided those two communities were and how toxic much of the content was.

Our initial paper was accepted for publication in autumn 2017, and we finished the final version in early October. Then things got interesting.

A few weeks later, in November 2017, the House Intelligence Committee released a list of accounts, given to them by Twitter, that were found to be associated with Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) and their influence campaign targeting the 2016 U.S. election. The activities of these accounts—the information operations that they were part of—had been occurring at the same time as the politicized conversations we had been studying so closely.

Looking over the list, we recognized several account names. We decided to cross-check the list of accounts with the accounts in our #BlackLivesMatter dataset. Indeed, dozens of the accounts in the list appeared in our data. Some—like @Crystal1Johnson and @TEN_GOP—were among the most retweeted accounts in our analysis. And some of the tweet examples we featured in our earlier paper, including some of the most problematic tweets, were not posted by “real” #BlackLivesMatter or #BlueLivesMatter activists, but by IRA accounts.

To get a better view of how IRA accounts participated in the #BlackLivesMatter Twitter conversation, we created another network graph (below) using retweet patterns from the accounts. Similar to the graph above, we saw two different clusters of accounts that tended to retweet other accounts in their cluster, but not accounts in the other cluster. Again, there was a cluster of accounts (on the left, in magenta) that was pro-BlackLivesMatter and liberal/Democrat and a cluster (on the right, in green) that was anti-BlackLivesMatter and conservative/Republican.

Retweet Network Graph of Accounts in Twitter Conversations about #BlackLivesMatter and Shooting Events in 2016. Courtesy of Kate Starbird/University of Washington

Next, we identified and highlighted the accounts identified as part of the IRA’s information operations. That graph—in all its creepy glory—is below, with the IRA accounts in orange and other accounts in blue.

Retweet Network Graph plus IRA Troll Accounts. Courtesy of Kate Starbird/University of Washington

As you can see, the IRA accounts impersonated activists on both sides of the conversation. On the left were IRA accounts like @Crystal1Johnson, @gloed_up, and @BleepThePolice that enacted the personas of African-American activists supporting #BlackLivesMatter. On the right were IRA accounts like @TEN_GOP, @USA_Gunslinger, and @SouthLoneStar that pretended to be conservative U.S. citizens or political groups critical of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Ahmer Arif conducted a deep qualitative analysis of the IRA accounts active in this conversation, studying their profiles and tweets to understand how they carefully crafted and maintained their personas. Among other observations, Arif described how, as a left-leaning person who supports #BlackLivesMatter, it was easy to problematize much of the content from the accounts on the “right” side of the graph: Some of that content, which included racist and explicitly anti-immigrant statements and images, was profoundly disturbing. But in some ways, he was more troubled by his reaction to the IRA content from the left side of the graph, content that often aligned with his own frames. At times, this content left him feeling doubtful about whether it was really propaganda after all.

This underscores the power and nuance of these strategies. These IRA agents were enacting caricatures of politically active U.S. citizens. In some cases, these were gross caricatures of the worst kinds of online actors, using the most toxic rhetoric. But, in other cases, these accounts appeared to be everyday people like us, people who care about the things we care about, people who want the things we want, people who share our values and frames. These suggest two different aspects of these information operations.

First, these information operations are targeting us within our online communities, the places we go to have our voices heard, to make social connections, to organize political action. They are infiltrating these communities by acting like other members of the community, developing trust, gathering audiences. Second, these operations begin to take advantage of that trust for different goals, to shape those communities toward the strategic goals of the operators (in this case, the Russian government).

One of these goals is to “sow division,” to put pressure on the fault lines in our society. A divided society that turns against itself, that cannot come together and find common ground, is one that is easily manipulated. Look at how the orange accounts in the graph (Figure 3) are at the outside of the clusters; perhaps you can imagine them literally pulling the two communities further apart. Russian agents did not create political division in the United States, but they were working to encourage it.

That IRA accounts sent messages supporting #BlackLivesMatter does not mean that ending racial injustice in the United States aligns with Russia’s strategic goals or that #BlackLivesMatter is an arm of the Russian government.

Their second goal is to shape these communities toward their other strategic aims. Not surprisingly, considering what we now know about their 2016 strategy, the IRA accounts on the right in this graph converged in support of Donald Trump. Their activity on the left is more interesting. As we discussed in our previous paper (written before we knew about the IRA activities), the accounts in the pro-#BlackLivesMatter cluster were harshly divided in sentiment about Hillary Clinton and the 2016 election. When we look specifically at the IRA accounts on the left, they were consistently critical of Hillary Clinton, highlighting previous statements of hers they perceived to be racist and encouraging otherwise left-leaning people not to vote for her. Therefore, we can see the IRA accounts using two different strategies on the different sides of the graph, but with the same goal (of electing Donald Trump).

The #BlackLivesMatter conversation isn’t the only political conversation the IRA targeted. With the new data provided by Twitter, we can see there were several conversational communities they participated in, from gun rights to immigration issues to vaccine debates. Stepping back and keeping these views of the data in mind, we need to be careful, both in the case of #BlackLivesMatter and these other public issues, to resist the temptation to say that because these movements or communities were targeted by Russian information operations, they are therefore illegitimate. That IRA accounts sent messages supporting #BlackLivesMatter does not mean that ending racial injustice in the United States aligns with Russia’s strategic goals or that #BlackLivesMatter is an arm of the Russian government. (IRA agents also sent messages saying the exact opposite, so we can assume they are ambivalent at most).

If you accept this, then you should also be able to think similarly about the IRA activities supporting gun rights and ending illegal immigration in the United States. Russia likely does not care about most domestic issues in the United States. Their participation in these conversations has a different set of goals: to undermine the U.S. by dividing us, to erode our trust in democracy (and other institutions), and to support specific political outcomes that weaken our strategic positions and strengthen theirs. Those are the goals of their information operations.

One of the most amazing things about the internet age is how it allows us to come together—with people next door, across the country, and around the world—and work together toward shared causes. We’ve seen the positive aspects of this with digital volunteerism during disasters and online political activism during events like the Arab Spring. But some of the same mechanisms that make online organizing so powerful also make us particularly vulnerable, in these spaces, to tactics like those the IRA are using.

Passing along recommendations from Arif, if we could leave readers with one goal, it’s to become more reflective about how we engage with information online (and elsewhere), to tune in to how this information affects us (emotionally), and to consider how the people who seek to manipulate us (for example, by shaping our frames) are not merely yelling at us from the “other side” of these political divides, but are increasingly trying to cultivate and shape us from within our own communities.

Go to the profile of Kate Starbird

WRITTEN BY

Kate Starbird

Asst. Professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering at UW. Researcher of crisis informatics and online rumors. Aging athlete. Army brat.

WHAT to say to WHOM : Take the free online course on this site

October 5, 2018

Getting the right message to the right people is not as intuitive as it might seem.

You obviously can’t talk to everyone at the same time, so a first challenge is to identify who you will talk to, the target group that is the most relevant for us, here and now. In other words: your particular objective, at this particular time, in your current context.

And then of course, it’s about what to say. Sadly, information only doesn’t change people. But so what does ???

And the way in which you communicate your message to your audience might matter just as much as the rest.

To dig deeper into these aspects, we have developed an interactive online course, full of examples and lessons on how campaigners from around the world faced these challenges.

You can access the course HERE

Why People Share: The Psychology of Social Sharing

September 24, 2018

We lately found this article on coschedule.com and though it’s business-focused, some lessons seem to be transferable to our sector. Below are the elements we suggest you have a look at and see how they resonate with your current practice on social media.

“People buy (and share content) from those that they know, like, and trust. Most sharing, as it turns out, is primarily dependent on the personal relationships of your readers. The data shows that the likelihood of your content being shared has more to do with your readers relationship to others than their relationship to you.

The most common reasons people share something with others are pretty surprising. Let’s look at the data.

Get Your Free Why People Share Infographic!

  1. To bring valuable and entertaining content to others.  49% say sharing allows them to inform others of products they care about and potentially change opinions or encourage action
  2. To define ourselves to others. 68% share to give people a better sense of who they are and what they care about
  3. To grow and nourish our relationships. 78% share information online because it lets them stay connected to people they may not otherwise stay in touch with
  4. Self-fulfillment. 69% share information because it allows them to feel more involved in the world
  5. To get the word out about causes or brands. 84% share because it is a way to support causes or issues they care about

It was also found that some users share as a act of “information management.” 73% of respondents said that they process information more deeply, thoroughly and thoughtfully when they share it.

As if that wasn’t enough, you also need to realize that good content comes with a high entertainment factor. Rather than a generic stock image, consider custom graphics or charts that present your content to readers in a brand new way. If you haven’t before, consider a video or infographic as a way to add more value, and more entertainment, to your content.

Connect Your Readers To Others

Your readers have an instinctual need to connect with others. Just look at the success of social networks like Facebook and Twitter. People like people.

In content marketing, the fabric of these connections is directly related to the content that we consume and share with our online network.

Here’s a small example: when is the last time that you left a comment on a post without sharing the post itself? Probably never. When we attach a conversation to a piece of content, we become very likely to share that content with others.

In addition, some readers will actually share their comment with a social share. The Facebook and Google+ commenting utilities (link) prove how closely these two things that are connected.

One way to do this is to try and end as many posts as possible with a question that our readers and can answer in the comments. While they don’t always do it, the question will often get them thinking and helps them apply.

Another option is to occasionally hit on the controversial post.  Overall, this is a good thing and helps people connect with others.

Make Them Feel More Valuable

In the New York Times study one respondent was quoted as saying that she enjoyed “getting comments that I sent great information and that my friends will forward it to their friends because it’s so helpful. It makes me feel valuable.”

This is pretty cool! Not only can your content help your readers become a subject matter expert in their field, but it can also help them look like one for their peers.

June 5, 2018
Article first published on IPS journal

The globalisation of anti-gender campaigns

Transnational anti-gender movements in Europe and Latin America create unlikely alliances

By Sonia Corrêa, David Paternotte, Roman Kuhar |
EPA

EPA
Hundreds of people take part during a demonstration in front of the Paraguayan Congress in Asuncion to claim a public education system based on traditional family values.

In 2012 and 2013, thousands of people demonstrated against same-sex marriage in Paris and other French cities. The success of these protests came as a surprise in a country often associated with secularism and sexual freedom.

The organisation La Manif pour Tous led some of the demonstrations, taking to the streets with pink and blue flags. It urged activists abroad to emulate the French with slogans, posters and strategies travelling across borders. While similar mobilisations happened earlier in Spain, Italy, Croatia and Slovenia, 2012 appears to have been a turning point.

Spectacular mobilisations have also taken place in Latin America, which is both a key target and a production hub of anti-gender campaigns. A first flare was registered in 2011 in Paraguay, when the term ‘gender’ was contested by the Catholic right during discussions on the national education plan. In 2013, in one of his weekly TV programmes, Ecuador’s leftist president Rafael Corrêa similarly denounced ‘gender ideology’ as an instrument aimed at destroying the family. Since 2014, these attacks have intensified, with massive demonstrations in numerous countries, and they decisively impacted the Colombian peace agreement referendum in 2016.

It culminated in November 2017, when American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler was viciously attacked in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Although the attack received global attention, it is only the tip of the iceberg in Latin America.

Transnational campaigns

In both regions, these movements contest what they call gender ideology. Sometimes referred to as gender theory or genderism, it is presented as the matrix of the combatted policy reforms, and should therefore not be confused with gender studies or specific equality policies. No less importantly, gender ideology is seen by some as the cover for a totalitarian plan by radical feminists, LGBTQI activists and gender scholars to seize political power.

Numerous scholars have traced the origins of gender ideology back to the Vatican and their political allies.

Crucially, this discourse recaptures and reframes Cold War Catholic discourses against Marxism and stirs anti-communist sentiments in Eastern Europe as well as in Latin America. There, the ‘evils of gender’ are entangled by right-wing activists with the ‘spectres of Venezuela’ or calls for a military intervention. Although national triggers vary (abortion and reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, LGBTI parental rights, gender mainstreaming, gender violence, sex education, anti-discrimination policies and so on), the explanation given by anti-gender campaigners is always the same: all this is due to gender ideology.

These movements not only share a common enemy, they display similar discourses and strategies as well as a distinctive style of action. We label them transnational anti-gender campaigns to emphasise their global scope and underline their particular profile in the wider landscape of opposition to feminism and LGBTI rights.

A Catholic cradle

Numerous scholars have traced the origins of gender ideology back to the Vatican and their political allies. Building on previous projects such as Pope John-Paul II’s Theology of the Body lectures or the New Evangelization, it was designed in response to the 1994 Conference on Population and Development in Cairo and the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing, when the term ‘gender’ entered the United Nations vocabulary, surrounded by demands for rights relating to reproduction and sexuality.

This discourse, which relies on ideas espoused by Cardinal Ratzinger in the early 1980s, was developed in Europe and Latin America in the late 1990s and early 2000s, leading to the Lexicon: Ambiguous and Debatable Terms Regarding Family Life and Ethical Questions (2003) and the Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and World (2004).

Gender ideology is not only a lens through which to analyse what happened at the UN, but also a Catholic strategy of action. Based on philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony, it propagates its alternative interpretation of gender through means that subvert the notions it opposes. While John-Paul II and Benedict XVI designed this project, Pope Francis has repeatedly expressed his support, describing gender as a form of  ‘ideological colonisation’.

Campaigns on the ground

Contemporary mobilisations, however, cannot be reduced to a Catholic enterprise, but intersect with other political projects and wider sets of actors. First, present strategies are reminiscent of the US Christian Right, and US organisations are active across continents, propelling transnational networks such as the World Congress of Families.

Since evangelical voices, which are new in Latin America, are more strident, the intellectual role of the Catholic hierarchy is often overlooked.

Second, while the Vatican has been instrumental in elaborating a frame of action, actors on the ground are more diverse. They include other religious groups as well as secular voices, and form coalitions that vary considerably according to local contexts.

The European situation cannot not be understood without looking at intersections with right-wing populisms. Both rely on attacks against corrupt elites and pretend to defend ‘innocent children’. They invoke common sense against decadent ideas and claim that things have ‘gone too far’, depicting themselves as the defenders of a majority silenced by powerful lobbies. These encounters explain why, in several European countries, right-wing populists have joined anti-gender campaigns without being particularly religious. This overlap offers a springboard to anti-genderists while fuelling anti-liberal discourses and sentiments.

Campaigns in Russia and the parts of Europe under Russian influence have been directly engineered from the Kremlin with the support of the Russian Orthodox church. As part of the state machinery, they are instrumentalised to restore the international status of Russia through a global defence of national sovereignty and ‘traditional values’. Poland and Hungary are currently following this path, with Hungary’s prime minister, Victor Orban, increasingly vocal on the issue.

Latin America campaigns displays distinctive features. First, more than anywhere else, the criticism of gender ideology is no monopoly of the right, even though right-wingers are usually on the front lines. Second, these campaigns involve both conservative Catholics and evangelicals (mostly neo-Pentecostals). Since evangelical voices, which are new in the region, are more strident, the intellectual role of the Catholic hierarchy is often overlooked. However, Latin American Catholics have significantly contributed to the development of the anti-gender discourse and current anti-gender formations rely on older Catholic anti-abortion structures.

Third, anti-gender political formations are not exclusively religious but encompass secular actors whose profile differs substantially across countries. In Brazil, they include politicians playing electoral games, extreme-right actors, centre-liberals articulating anti-state arguments alongside anti-gender arguments, middle-class activists longing for social order and transnationally connected Jewish right-wing activists.

Indeed, if anti-gender campaigns are so efficient, it is precisely because they amalgamate actors who would not usually work together.

Despite this unexpected diversity, however, the populist analytical frame, so common in Europe and the US, is inappropriate. Indeed, populist practices have long been deeply ingrained in the regional political culture. As a result, populism has no side and cannot be easily mapped on to the left-right divide in the region.

A complex constellation

Anti-gender movements include a complex constellation of actors that goes far beyond specific religious affiliations. Research has shown that ‘gender ideology’ is an empty signifier, which can tap into different fears and anxieties in specific contexts and therefore be shaped to fit distinct political projects. Furthermore, as stressed by Andrea Peto, Eszter Kováts, Maari Põim and Weronika Grzebalska, the vague notion of gender ideology operates as a ‘symbolic glue’ that facilitates cooperation between actors despite their divergences.

This is precisely what must be understood: what are the specific constellations of actors in each context and how can different sorts of actors, who usually do not work together and can even compete with each other, find a common ground on which to collaborate?

In brief, how to explain joint ventures between believers and atheists, Catholic and Russian Orthodox or Latin American evangelical, or opposed strands within contemporary Roman Catholicism? It must also be reiterated that the debate is not about faith against atheism, and that not all believers of a specific denomination are involved in these campaigns.

A more sophisticated analytical frame would allow us to move away from simplistic grids such as populism, the global right or a global backlash, and pay more attention to the specific political formations at play on the ground. It would also avoid narrow binary frames opposing ‘us’ to ‘them’ that unduly homogenise distinctive contextual conditions and a complex array of forces and actors.

Finally, contextualisation and complexification are not only needed analytically, but are politically essential. Indeed, if anti-gender campaigns are so efficient, it is precisely because they amalgamate actors who would not usually work together. Today, it is crucial to further understand how these mysterious coalitions are forged and sustained.

Why Facebook Is a Waste of Time—and Money—for Arts Nonprofits

March 3, 2018

The team from Artistic Activism takes a stand on an issue that is a major preoccupation for all non-profits. A bold move but are we ready to give up FB???

This articles appeared first on ARTNET

Steve Lambert,

Why Facebook Is a Waste of Time—and Money—for Arts Nonprofits

The co-founder of the nonprofit Center for Artistic Activism explains why his company has officially de-friended Facebook.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in San Francisco, California. Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images.

Like many nonprofits, we use Facebook to connect with our audiences, and they use Facebook to stay in touch with us. It’s not our preferred way, but it’s where more than 4,000 people have chosen to stay informed about what we do at the Center for Artistic Activism. Part of our philosophy at the C4AA is to meet people where they are, and, undeniably, hundreds of millions of people (and some bots) are on Facebook. However, looking at the statistics provided by Facebook, we’ve come to realize that the connection we were after isn’t actually made.

That’s why we’ve decided to stop putting effort into Facebook. The world’s largest social network has become an increasingly inhospitable place for nonprofits.

We currently have 4,093 “fans” of our page on Facebook. For a scrappy organization focused on artistic activism, that’s not bad (especially since we never bought followers to boost our numbers). Those thousands came from years of hard work doing outreach.

From left: Steve Lambert, Rebecca Bray, and Stephen Duncombe, directors of the C4AA. Courtesy of Steve Lambert.

Stephen Duncombe and I started the organization around 2009, shortly after Facebook asked organizations to create “pages” to help differentiate from personal “profiles.” In those early years, we used our fan page to share the progress we were making to support artists and activists fighting corruption in West Africa, to help save lives in the opioid crisis, to get proper healthcare for LGBTQ people in Eastern Europe, and our work to make activism more creative, fun, and effective.

After trainings and other events, our page was especially active as new alumni from countries around the world joined to stay in touch. However, in recent years, the traffic dropped off.

Looking at the Numbers

During that time, we’ve grown significantly as an organization—adding staff positions, increasing programming—but I wouldn’t blame our Facebook followers for thinking the C4AA was dormant, if not dead.

They weren’t seeing everything we shared—and may not have been seeing anything. They’ve asked to hear from us, but Facebook decides if and when they actually do. And in reality, it’s not often. Here are the stats Facebook provides us:

Screenshot of C4AA's Facebook analytics. Courtesy of Steve Lambert.

Screenshot of C4AA’s Facebook analytics. Courtesy of Steve Lambert.

This shows how many people (anyone, not exclusively fans of our page) have seen our posts over the past three months. With a few exceptions, you can see most posts don’t reach more than a tenth of the number who have opted to follow our page. In recent weeks, we’ve reached an average of around 3 percent.

This is by design. People think the Facebook algorithm is complicated, and it does weigh many factors, but reaching audiences through their algorithm is driven by one thing above all others: payment. Facebook’s business model for organizations is to sell your audience back to you.

In the past, you could boost your social media reach by writing better posts and including images and video. But in recent years, targeted spending on advertising has overtaken all other tips and tricks. To reach more people who already requested to hear from the C4AA, we’d have to give our donors’ money to Facebook to “boost” our posts.

Now, are we simply against paying Facebook? Do we not want to give our donors’ money to one of the largest corporations on the planet, one that has enriched its leadership and shareholders by not paying the artists, journalists, and everyday people who give the site value? Do we want to withhold support to a company that’s barely taken responsibility for enabling Russian disinformation to reach US citizens in an effort to undermine democratic elections? Do we think that Facebook is turning the internet from an autonomous, social democratic space into an expanding, poorly managed shopping mall featuring a food court of candied garbage and Jumbotrons blasting extreme propaganda that’s built on top of the grave of the free and open web? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. That’s why we’ve never been big fans, much less paid to use Facebook.

Why Facebook Is Bad News

However, for the sake of argument, let’s imagine that we accept that this is Facebook’s business model, and it is free to create its own rules on its private platform. Fine. There’s still a broader inequity to address.

Facebook’s pricing treats nonprofits and artists the same as a multinational corporation like Coca-Cola, a high-end neighborhood boutique hair salon, or a vitamin supplement scam. The advertising model makes no exceptions for nonprofits—even though we have nothing to sell and our mission, legally bound, is for the common good.

This difference in purpose is significant. It’s why the US government does not charge taxes to nonprofits, and the postal service offers reduced rates. Even other tech companies put nonprofits in a different category. Paypal charges less to process charitable donations and enables fundraising opportunities through partners like eBay.

At the C4AA, we use the messaging system Slack, and were delighted to learn it offers a significant discount to non-profits to upgrade from their free plan to the standard plan. That discount? 100 percent. To upgrade to the top plan, the Plus Plan, the discount is 85 percent. Slack partners with the non-profit TechSoup, which arranges discounted software, hardware, and support from for-profits to nonprofit organizations. One TechSoup partner, Google—yes, that Google—offers thousands of in-kind dollars for “ad grants” so nonprofits can compete to communicate alongside for-profit companies.

Facebook offers no such discount. It considers all communication from any organization to be a form of “advertising.” Facebook will take the money of anyone who pays—whether to sell products or discord.

Sure, we can keep posting there anyway for free, but less than 3 percent of our followers would know.

Meanwhile, the Facebook-using public—around two billion people—is unaware of what they are missing. My social network may consist of a mix of the causes I care about, artists who challenge my thinking, independent news organizations I trust, some friends and family, and even a few businesses I like. But what I select is not what I see—at least not entirely. And this is a system that puts artists and nonprofits at a disadvantage.

In the past two years, we’ve seen this problem get worse. After the 2016 election, the C4AA began considering this decision more seriously, and after much internal discussion among our leadership and a few board members, along with last week’s indictments, we felt it was time. As much as Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg claim to want to build community and bring the world closer together, their business decisions tell another story.

Looking Ahead

For some nonprofits, paying Facebook for access to supporters is a deal they’re willing to make. No judgment here. C4AA staff still use it to stay in touch with friends. Many organizations we work alongside use Facebook for advocacy efforts. We know for some it may not be a reasonable option to withdraw. We’re not insisting anyone needs to adhere to some arbitrary purity standard. We’ve just decided Facebook is not for us.

For now, we’ve found our email newsletters much more effective because at least we know the message reaches the subscribers’ inbox. And while we are no longer investing our time or our donors’ money into Facebook, it’s not a complete departure. We’re letting automated systems repost from our website and from other social networks.

Leaving history’s biggest social network feels risky. We don’t want to lose those 4,000-plus people—though, in a way, they’ve been lost for a long time. And we remember: It’s not that big of a deal! This makes us only slightly more radical than the Unilever Corporation.

If you’re at a nonprofit and wondering what you can do, have a conversation with your leadership and make a conscious choice. Look at your Facebook stats. Are you reaching your audience? Is paying worth it? Is the money, content, and audience you give Facebook consistent with the goals and mission of your organization?

The Center for Artistic Activism is at C4AA.org. You can sign up for the Center for Artistic Activism email newsletter here. You could also follow us on Facebook, but what would be the point?

Steve Lambert is an associate professor of new media at the State University of New York at Purchase College, a co-founder and co-director of the Center for Artistic Activism, and an artist whose work can be seen at visitsteve.com.

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