media. In general, however, the FTC has trouble enforcing its guidelines because they are nonbonding instructions rather than formal rules and therefore are more open to interpretation. For recent work on this topic, see Keith Coop, “Influencers: Not So Fluent in Disclosure Compliance,” Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review 41, no. 1 (2021).
76 Giovanni De Gregorio and Catalina Goanta, “The Influencer Republic: Monetizing Political Speech on Social Media,” German Law Journal 23, no. 2 (March 23, 2022): 204–225, https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2022.15.
77 Renée DiResta, “How the Creator Economy Is Incentivizing Propaganda,” NOEMA, June 7, 2023, https://www.noemamag.com/the-new-media-goliaths.
78 Edward L. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923; reis., New York: Ig Publishing, 2011), 92.
79 Jemima Kelly, “Substack’s Success Shows Readers Have Had Enough of Polarised Media,” Financial Times, March 31, 2021, https://www.ft.com/content/3e565df2-0cb2-4126-a879-eb2710 eef03a.
80 Glenn Greenwald, “Glenn Greenwald,” Rumble, n.d., https://rumble.com/GGreenwald. Audience count as of December 3, 2023.
81 Clio Chang, “The Substackerati,” Columbia Journalism Review, November 16, 2020, https://www.cjr.org/special_report/substackerati.php.
CHAPTER 4: THE CROWD
1 George F. Young et al., “Starling Flock Networks Manage Uncertainty in Consensus at Low Cost,” PLoS Computational Biology 9, no. 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002894.
2 Renée DiResta, “How Online Mobs Act like Flocks of Birds,” NOEMA, November 3, 2022, https://www.noemamag.com/how-online-mobs-act-like-flocks-of-birds.
3 As with birds, that behavior does not necessarily have to be rational. In 2016, the games company “Cards against Humanity” launched a crowdfunding site that invited people to donate their hard-earned cash to pay for a backhoe that was digging a hole in a field—for absolutely no reason at all. They livestreamed the digger excavating the pointless hole somewhere in America, explaining that “as long as money keeps coming in, we’ll keep digging,” In the end, they raised more than $100,000. See Laura Wagner, “People Knowingly Donated $100,000 to Dig a Big, Pointless Hole in the Ground,” The Guardian, November 27, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/28/cards-against-humanity-hole.
4 Sara Brin Rosenthal et al., “Revealing the Hidden Networks of Interaction in Mobile Animal Groups Allows Prediction of Complex Behavioral Contagion,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 15 (2015): 4690–4695, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1420068112.
5 Naomi Forman-Katz and Katerina Eva Matsa, “News Platform Fact Sheet,” Pew Research Center, September 20, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/news-platform-fact-sheet.
6 David Shor, “One Needle to Predict Them All: Does the New York Times Needle Really Need to Exist?” (interview by Mike Pesca, The Gist [podcast], January 5, 2021), https://slate.com/podcasts/the-gist/2021/01/new-york-times-polling-and-georgia.
7 David Shor (@davidshor), “Post-MLK-assasination race riots reduced Democratic vote share…,” Twitter, May 28, 2020, https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1265998625836019712.
8 Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon), “So we’re really concern trolling for the purposes of increasing democratic turnout. Tell you what, go to Minneapolis…,” Twitter, May 28, 2020, https://twitter.com/BenjaminPDixon/status/1266119727665029120.
9 Ari Trujillo Wesler (@TheReFTW), “Post-MLK-assasination race riots reduced Democratic vote share…,” Twitter, https://twitter.com/TheReFTW/status/1266146619805728768.
10 Eric Levitz, “David Shor’s Unified Theory of American Politics,” Intelligencer, July 17, 2020, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/david-shor-cancel-culture-2020-election-theory-polls.html.
11 Yascha Mounk, “Stop Firing the Innocent,” The Atlantic, June 27, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615.
12 Jonathan Chait, “The Still-Vital Case for Liberalism in a Radical Age,” Intelligencer, June 11, 2020, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/case-for-liberalism-tom-cotton-new-york-times-james-bennet.html.
13 Jonathan Chait, “An Elite Progressive LISTSERV Melts Down over a Bogus Racism Charge,” Intelligencer, June 23, 2020, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/case-for-liberalism-tom-cotton-new-york-times-james-bennet.html.
14 Matthew Yglesias, “The Real Stakes in the David Shor Saga,” Vox, July 29, 2020, https://www.vox.com/2020/7/29/21340308/david-shor-omar-wasow-speech.
15 Renée DiResta, “Mediating Consent,” The Feed, Ribbonfarm, December 17, 2019, https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2019/12/17/mediating-consent.
16 For a full examination of the means by which the internet transformed advocacy and organizing, see David Karpf, The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy, Oxford Studies in Digital Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
17 Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), introduction.
18 Stephan Lewandowsky, Ronald E. Robertson, and Renée DiResta, “Challenges in Understanding Human-Algorithm Entanglement During Online Information Consumption,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, July 10, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231180809.
19 Sinan Aral, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health—and How We Must Adapt (New York: Currency, 2020), 194–197.
20 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (1960; reis., New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 29.
21 Renée DiResta, “Crowds and Technology,” Ribbonfarm, September 15, 2016, https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/09/15/crowds-and-technology.
22 Renée DiResta, “Elon Musk Is Fighting for Attention, Not Free Speech,” The Atlantic, April 14, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/elon-musk-buy-twitter-free-speech/629571.
23 I’ve chosen to use Wikipedia for some citations on controversial topics, including this one, because of the “negotiated facts” and consensus process that results in the creation of Wikipedia’s articles. See “Gamergate (Harassment Campaign),” Wikipedia, last modified August 12, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign).
24 USA Today quotes Steve Bannon, who took over Breitbart News in 2012, describing the rise of the alt-right movement that Breitbart helped to galvanize: “You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.” Mike Snider, “Steve Bannon Learned to Harness Troll Army from ‘World of Warcraft,’” USA Today, July 18, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/steve-bannon-learned-harness-troll-army-world-warcraft/489713001.
25 Emily St. James, “#Gamergate: Here’s Why Everybody in the Video Game World Is Fighting,” Vox, October 13, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/9/6/6111065/gamergate-explained-everybody-fighting.
26 Caitlin Dewey, “The Only Guide to Gamergate You Will Ever Need to Read,” Washington Post, October 14, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/14/the-only-guide-to-gamergate-you-will-ever-need-to-read.
27 Study methodologies vary but range from 7 to 15 percent for staunchly antivaccine and up to 30 percent for vaccine hesitant. See Timothy B. Gravelle et al., “Estimating the Size of ‘Anti-vax’ and Vaccine Hesitant Populations in the US, UK, and Canada: Comparative Latent Class Modeling of Vaccine Attitudes,” Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics 18, no. 1 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1080/21645515.2021.2008214; Hannah A. Roberts et al., “To Vax or Not to Vax: Predictors of Anti-vax Attitudes and COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Prior to Widespread Vaccine Availability,” PLoS One 17, no. 2 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264019.
28 Sarah Elbeshbishi and Mabinty Quarshie, “Fewer Than 1 in 5 Support ‘Defund the Police’ Movement, USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll Finds,” USA Today, March 7, 2021, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/03/07/usa-today-ipsos-poll-just-18-support-defund-police-movement/4599232001.
29 Political keywords in bios also became more prevalent. A study of keywords in Twitter user bios found that indicators of political identity almost tripled between 2015 and 2018. N. Rogers and J. J. Jones, “Using Twitter Bios to Measure Changes in Self-Identity: Are Americans Defining Themselves More Politically over Time?,” Journal of Social Computing 2, no. 1 (March 2021): 1–13, https://doi.org/10.23919/JSC.2021.0002.
30 B. J. Bethel, “GamerGate Meme War Shares DNA with Pro–Donald Trump Trolls,” Sydney Morning Herald, September 14,