How much of our digital ecosystem is truly authentic?
An introduction to ‘Lie machines’.
This series of blog posts will be a critical analysis and review into the themes and issues presented in Philip N. Howards book, Lie machines: How to save democracy from troll armies, deceitful robots, junk news operations, and political operatives.
In the book, Howard (2020) tackles and deconstructs the ‘lie machine’, which is defined as:
‘a system of people and technologies that distribute false messages in the service of a political agenda’ (p.14).
Howard breaks down the lie machine into three key components: producers, distributors and marketers of political lies.
Producers include any type of ‘political parties, authoritarian regimes and radical social movements’ (Howard, 2020, p.6). Distributors consist of social media platforms and their algorithms. Lastly, marketers include ‘armies of online trolls’ (Mathews, 2020) and consulting firms hired to create political campaigns informed by user data.
The lie machine is illustrated through case studies such as Russia and the IRA (Internet research agency), one of the first large scale multimedia lie machines. Another example being lies generated in support for #VoteLeave party during the 2016 EU referendum.
Howard is able to nail down his message: our democracy is in danger and that ‘the real threats to democracy lie ahead of us’ (Dwonch, 2020, p.3).
This message is mirrored in our current global politics, with twenty-six authoritarian regimes implementing ‘computational propaganda as a tool for information control’ as of 2019 (Bradshaw & Howard, 2019, p.5).
‘Computational propaganda is the misleading news and information, algorithmically generated and distributed, that ends up in your social media feed’ (Howard, 2020, p.67).
Attributed authors and researchers, such as Claudia Saviaga and Albana Dwonch share their agreement with Howard in their reviews of ‘Lie machines’. The numerous examples of disinformation campaigns given in the book are acknowledged and is widely known as a good foundation for further studies. The validity and credibility in Howard’s work is unquestionable.
We are consistently informed of the ‘sensational, extremist, conspiratorial’ (Saviaga, 2021, p.225) junk news spread by lie machines throughout the book, however, it can be argued that it ‘does not venture far enough’ (Dwonch, 2020, p.3).
We are given warnings of how future artificial intelligence can pose a greater threat to democracy and completely change the makeup of lie machines and computational propaganda. However, the mention is brief and drastic as well as the small solutions suggested to help aid the issue. These solutions also do not appear to account for emerging countries, who are heavily embedded with political lies, and are made up of users who have a lower digital literacy and less access to outside sources.
With my blog posts, I will be taking on Howard’s advice and attacking lie machines through raising awareness and creating a greater understanding of the working components within them. I will be breaking down disinformation, the role social media plays within it and using case studies to go into greater depth of bot networks and AI.
Howard is correct in emphasising the importance of knowing what a lie machine is. By knowing what they are, we can expose them for the lies and propaganda they attempt to spread.
Thank you for reading, please go and share this with your friends! But before you do…
Bibliography
Bradshaw, S., & Howard, P. N. (2019). The global disinformation order: 2019 global inventory of organised social media manipulation. Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/scholcom/207
Dwonch, A. (2020). Philip N. Howard, Lie Machines, How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives. International Journal Of Communication, 14(3). https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/15784.
Howard, P. N. (2020). Lie machines: How to save democracy from troll armies, deceitful robots, junk news operations, and political operatives. Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv10sm8wg.
Mathews, J. T. (2020, Oct). Lie machines. Foreign Affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/lie-machines
Saviaga, F. C. (2021). Review of the book Lie machines: How to save democracy from troll armies, deceitful robots, junk news operations, and political operatives, by Philip N. Howard. Information & Culture, 56(2), 225–226. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/797387.
