“It’s been too many years of too much everything — chaos, crisis, noise, and information. Too much accumulates.”
By Whitney Phillips
August 7, 2024
I had already done a great deal of research for The Oxygen of Amplification report before I started writing it in 2017. I just didn’t realize it was research. My work, which since 2008 had focused on trolling and media manipulation, had put me into frequent contact with reporters looking to cover coordinated harassment campaigns, offensive internet memes, and of course the political rise of Donald Trump. In interviews, I would often steer the conversation to the ethics of reporting on people who weren’t just looking to cause harm (or at least chaos), but who actively, even desperately, wanted attention from journalists. It was a dynamic I had been interested in since I began researching trolling on 4chan (the subject of my first book, based on my PhD dissertation).
Some of the reporters I talked to were sympathetic to this concern. Many were not. But by 2017, catalyzed in large part by the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, more and more of the reporters I worked with were worried about journalism’s role in spreading false and bigoted messages. Amid this shift, I had the idea to capture their concerns in an ethics guide that updated the debate about the “oxygen of publicity” to focus on the oxygen of amplification. Unlike traditional publicity, amplification took the dynamics of social media — and virality of information — into account. It raised a series of questions that often clashed, or seemed to clash, with the very purpose of journalism, which is to inform the public on newsworthy subjects. In particular, did reporting on harms make those harms worse? Was “newsworthiness” a trap? Should some information simply not be covered? Over the next months, I interviewed 50 local and national reporters about their relationship to these and other questions, which proved especially vexing when the people spouting false and harmful messages (or trolling) were high-profile media and political figures.
The reporters’ answers to my questions were often messy; amplification was a complicated issue. More than that, it was an ambivalent issue. Editorial choices could — and often did — have outcomes that were simultaneously positive and negative. Reporting on manipulators, white nationalists, and antagonists helped those manipulators, white nationalists, and antagonists spread their message (it also made the manipulators laugh). But not reporting on their actions could also cause problems. Without coverage, the public wouldn’t be informed of what was happening and the manipulators would have full control of the narrative. What was the right thing to do? My subjects told me that a lot depended on the story in question, how it was told, who was telling it, and why. This was not the most satisfying conclusion, but it was ultimately reflected in one of the essential takeaways of the report, which was published in 2018: good (true and helpful) information is not always a perfect corrective to bad (false and harmful) information. Indeed, very good information can have very ambivalent effects.
Just six years later, a 2024 Oxygen report would need to contend with a very different set of information dynamics — and very different sources of ambivalence.
First, the fractures in today’s news environment are much deeper. While cable news and mainstream print journalism still reach millions of people per day, millions more get their news (or at least, their information) from social platforms like TikTok. What journalists cover — or not — still matters, but that reporting simply doesn’t shape public discourse in the same way it did even a few years ago. People are plugged into news cycles other than what’s reflected by the paper of record. That has shifted where the oxygen of amplification is coming from.
A related — and somewhat ironic — dynamic is the fact that some news outlets have learned the Trump era lessons of amplification a little too well. At least, they have taken to heart the idea that not everything Donald Trump himself says is newsworthy, especially his most outrageous lies and conspiracy theories, and especially especially when he posts them to his own social network, Truth Social. His statements still circulate widely within right wing networks, but are not faithfully reported on by the mainstream news media. This might reduce the falsehoods and conspiracy theories being amplified. But it also means that many people are less aware of the falsehoods and conspiracy theories Trump is spreading. Of course, for those who seek to consume Trump-focused content — in the form of articles or podcasts or videos or other media — there are extensive options. That said, if a person does not go out of their way to keep tabs on what Trump is up to, they’re far less likely than in 2016 or even 2020 to be inundated with images and audio of the former president through cultural osmosis. Politically, it might seem like not much is happening; nothing to see here, because many audiences are not being shown all there is to see.
It’s not just that many people aren’t being fed political news. Many people are choosing not to consume it — and because of so much media fracture, they don’t have to (what hush money trial?). And why would they want to? It’s been too many years of too much everything — chaos, crisis, noise, and information. Too much accumulates. (Note that I wrote this piece before Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Biden’s decision to step down from the presidential race and Kamala Harris’ rapid rise to the top of the Democratic ticket. At this moment, political news is difficult to avoid, even via memes; time will tell how all this excitement-mixed-with-tumult will impact sustained public interest in political news).
Heading into the 2022 midterms, I wrote about the consequences of a politics of too much. One obvious outcrop is anger, particularly anger directed at political opponents. All that screaming — whether on social media or in person — undermines healthy public debate. But so does the quieter articulation of stress: giving up on the conversation entirely, saying I can’t, backing away. Pluralistic democracy doesn’t work if too many people are too angry to compromise. It also doesn’t work if too many people are too tired to listen.
And then there’s the backlash against the “disinformation” frame itself, which at a certain point in the 2017-2019 window became the preferred term to “media manipulation.” There are good reasons to reflect critically on the disinformation frame, as Anthony Nadler and Doron Taussig explain; for me, one of the most compelling reasons is that “disinformation” often focuses on what’s true (that is to say, empirically verifiable) rather than what’s real (experienced as an identity or part of basic sensemaking). Drawing from Nadler and Taussig’s analysis, this is the difference between fact checking false claims about a stolen 2020 election and understanding the “deep story” — which they describe as “The Shunning” — that, for many conservatives, animates the felt sense that mainstream (liberal) culture seeks to purge conservatives from public life.
Other criticisms of the “disinformation” frame are much more partisan and challenging. If you are someone who aligns with institutional consensus — the norms, values, and standards of evidence codified within mainstream journalism, academia, and government — to call something “disinformation” is to perform a kind of sympathetic magic on yourself. For many conservative audiences, your use of that word transforms you into a liberal: one of the shunners.
Even back in 2017 it was understood that efforts to combat disinformation (then sometimes called the “fake news” problem) risked being deployed as what danah boyd called “an assertion of authority of epistemology.” What was perhaps less appreciated — certainly by me at the time — was the extent to which the disinformation frame tapped into eighty years of messages about the perceived liberal threat that many conservatives steeped in rightwing media had internalized. Mark Brockway and I explore that dynamic in our book The Shadow Gospel, a history of political demonization in the US that rethinks the story of the “culture wars.” As we explain, for a certain kind of conservative, academics’ and mainstream journalists’ use of “disinformation” was always going to feel like a weapon. It was always going to demand return fire. It was always going to feed into a politics of too much. In 2017, I didn’t understand what a challenge that would be. In 2024, I do.
This moment in media and politics is simply so much weirder than it was six years ago. The 2018 report was already focused on ambivalence: the idea that positive amplification outcomes with one audience can have negative outcomes with a different one — an idea I continued exploring in other work. In 2024, the ambivalence of the media landscape is even more intense. We live in a world where the necessary amplifications of the institutional-consensus January 6th Committee fed into rightwing narratives about January 6th “hostages” and a J6 prison choir. There is no question — from my institutional-consensus perspective — that amplifying truths about the 2020 election and concerns about what might happen in 2024 are necessary to protecting and preserving American democracy. But what do we do when these same efforts can push people to silence — or to violence? I don’t have an answer. I’m still trying to make sense of the question.
Whitney Phillips is assistant professor of digital platforms and ethics in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. Her book The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-Liberal Demonology Possessed US Religion, Media, and Politics, co-authored with Mark Brockway, provides a novel account of religious influence in the US and helps contextualize contemporary events and discourses including the January 6th, attack on the US Capitol, satanic conspiracy theorizing, and moral panics over “wokeness.” Her other books include Share Better and Stress Less: A Guide to Thinking Ecologically about Social Media and You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape. Phillips’s Data & Society report The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online, was published in 2018.