August 7, 2024
In 2016, Becca Lewis and I spent six months distilling the Data & Society media manipulation team’s painstaking fieldwork on far-right internet influence into a report titled Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. The report explained that journalism was vulnerable to far-right exploitation for many reasons: news organizations were losing money, requiring them to cut staff and rely heavily on pageviews. Journalists were under huge pressure to produce a steady stream of new content with fewer resources, often sourcing from social media or publishing sensational scoops to attract attention. During the 2016 election, Donald Trump’s use of Twitter to spread outrageous and inflammatory messaging enabled him to get far more coverage than other candidates. Norms of objectivity meant that many journalists felt required to cover “both sides” of every issue, even if the issue was a conspiracy theory or provably false. And because trust in the mainstream media was already low, and local news had declined precipitously, there was a vacuum which hyper-partisan and fringe media quickly filled. The response to the report was enormous; it was covered by dozens of news outlets, I briefed congressional staffers and foundations, and in 2017 received an award from Foreign Policy for the work. (We were also doxed by 4Chan, but for the most part, the far-right left us alone.)
The media manipulation team at Data & Society was the first qualitative research team dedicated to what we would now call “tech and democracy”: disinformation, platform governance, and the spread of far-right ideas. It was founded to deeply investigate danah boyd’s and Robyn Caplan’s early observations that a motley crew of far-right actors — trolls, white nationalists, male supremacist groups, conspiracy theorists, and the “alt-right” — were successfully pushing their talking points into mainstream media. These manipulators spread memes, amplified trending topics, and concocted attention-hogging hoaxes, all of which were surprisingly effective at setting mainstream media agendas and amplifying conspiracy theories and formerly fringe opinions. Our publications emphasized the importance of understanding the role of power and inequality in disinformation’s creation and spread, which was often ignored in more computational analyses.
This work was hard and mentally taxing; media manipulation team members were on the ground at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, an event which my UNC colleague Francesca Tripodi, then a postdoc at D&S, wrote about in her book The Propagandists’ Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy. Our work preceded acts of mass violence fueled by far-right ideas, such as the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018, the Tops supermarket shooting in Buffalo in 2022, and the January 6th Capitol attack. But those horrible events and others like them can be traced to the dynamics we chronicled; they are directly connected to far-right disinformation.
While the media manipulation team was made up mostly of junior scholars, its alums are now tenured and tenure-track faculty at major research institutions, and graduate students at places like Stanford and Harvard. Becca is writing a dissertation at Stanford on Silicon Valley conservatism, and I’m writing a book on far-right online radicalization. After D&S, I worked with scholars at UNC and Data & Society to put together an agenda for critical disinformation studies, recognizing the importance of history, political economy, and inequality in understanding technology and democracy.
This has been a bit of an uphill battle. To a certain extent, there’s still media coverage and attention to the far-right, and The Southern Poverty Law Center, the ADL, and other civil society organizations have continued to fund research on white nationalists. But with the end of the Trump presidency, which amplified far-right ideas and figureheads to an almost unprecedented degree, people’s attention drifted away to more pressing concerns — like the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 movement for racial justice, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the rise of generative AI, and the 2024 presidential election.
Amid all of this, what’s most notable is just how effective the far-right has been at changing public discourse. Far-right ideas have infiltrated our political discussion to such an extent that we barely view them as far-right anymore, let alone as disinformation. The enormous populist and legislative backlash to 2020’s movement for racial justice has resulted in the Supreme Court overturning affirmative action in college admissions and diminished DEI efforts around the country. It has influenced school curricula in states like Texas, North Carolina, and Florida, and inhibited police reform. All of these developments, and the ideas in which they’re grounded, are tremendously popular with far-right groups.
At the same time, public sympathy for LGBTQ+ folks, particularly trans and gender non-conforming people, has cratered. The backlash against queer rights, which comes directly from the far-right, has moved up the chain to the point where Target is no longer stocking Pride merchandise in their stores in many states. Anti-trans and anti-queer bills, which target gender-affirming care, diverse books, and drag shows, have proliferated across the country. Most Americans from marginalized and minoritized backgrounds always knew that social acceptance was founded on shaky ground. Even given that, I think many of us have been surprised at how effective the backlash has been.
It’s clear to me that traditional news, cable news, and political elites play a key role in spreading far-right ideas. Trump consistently appointed far-right actors to his political staff and amplified far-right viewpoints. Some mainstream journalists amplify conspiracy theories and disinformation in an attempt to debunk them. Others, like Tucker Carlson, consistently pushed far-right disinformation like the Great Replacement Theory (at least until Fox canceled his show). Some social platforms, inspired by Elon Musk’s takeover of X, have scaled back their Trust & Safety teams, while others, like Telegram, are more-or-less a free for all. But while, in 2016, I put the blame for this firmly on social platforms — and they do bear some of the blame — I now understand that these disinformative narratives are successful precisely because they play on Americans’ pre-existing biases and prejudices.
The goal of far-right actors was not just pushing their ideas into public discourse, but to instantiate them into public life through legislation. And to my dismay, this has succeeded, especially at the local level, where legislation (like that targeting trans kids and DEI policies) is explicitly fueled by far-right disinformation. Christian interest groups like the Family Policy Alliance and political operatives strategically collaborated to push the current wave of anti-trans legislation, but their views are echoed by mainstream outlets like The New York Times, which has consistently amplified anti-trans views. The bigoted narrative that queer people are “groomers” followed the same path as much of the far-right disinformation that Becca and I documented. It builds on age-old ideas connecting queer people to harm to kids, ideas that circulate and repeat; the Anita Bryant “Save our Children” campaign in Miami in 1977 is virtually identical to the anti-Drag Queen Story Hour messaging. This messaging was workshopped in social media and far-right blogs and voiced on sites like Infowars until it moved to Fox News and then to the attention of conservative pundit Christopher Rufo, who, after a successful war on “critical race theory,” turned his attention to some of the most marginalized people in the country — trans and gender non-conforming individuals — and decided they were the next “folk devils.”
The rise in far-right public opinion is not an organic grassroots movement, but a carefully architected campaign fueled by religious and ideological motivations. It is supported by fringe internet groups, but it is not caused by them; spaces like Telegram and 8kun often function as a sort of “farm team” for mainstream conservative ideas. But calling these ideas “far-right” seems to have fallen out of favor. Moving into the 2024 election cycle, we need to be very clear that public policy should not be based on moral panic and bigotry. Such legislation has real material impact on the lives of marginalized and minoritized people. Racist, misogynist, and transphobic public discourse has deep roots and long histories. It is justified by disinformation, and calling it out when we see it is more important than ever.