Participatory Propaganda in Seven Simple Steps

40
41
thus information exchange was hindered across
partisan right-wing Facebook pages feeding
party lines. 67 In a recent survey conducted by the
followers 38% fake content. 73 A section of the
KIND Foundation, 54% of respondents admitted
anonymous message board, 4Chan, (called “/pol”
that their social media feeds “mostly reflect
for “politically incorrect”), as well as The_Donald, a
worldviews similar to their own”, with only 5%
subreddit on the social news aggregation platform,
saying they see opposing perspectives. 68
Reddit, were both found to be channels for pushing
memes supporting Trump and attacking Clinton. 74
Echo chambers, once identified, can be injected
with persuasive information that conforms to
As noted earlier, the three pro-Trump Facebook
existing beliefs held by followers, encouraging
pages shared more alternative media sources than
the spread of that content, turning those inside
mainstream links in the month leading up to the
the filter bubble into propagandists. Moreover, as
2016 election. Of those links shared to the pro-
a group of researchers at Yale University recently
Trump pages and pointing to the conservative- and
found, “political echo chambers not only isolate
liberal-leaning pages also analysed, most were
one from opposing views, but also help to create
incubation chambers for blatantly false (but highly
salient and politicised) fake news stories.” 69
Echo chambers facilitate the spread of conspiracy
theories, 70 and those supporting Trump shared fake
news during the election, 71 72 with some hyper-
from either Fox or Breitbart. The page Eagle Rising
shared none of the 14 media pages analysed, and
the 1143 links posted between 7 October and
7 November 2016 pointed to just 14 websites,
including eaglerising.com
A manual categorisation of pages based on names
and content reveals that the three pro-Trump page
networks are decidedly part of right-leaning echo
chambers. Nearly all (94.1%) of the Citizens for
Trump network are right-leaning, pro-Trump pages,
while 82.7% of those within the Eagle Rising
network are. As the Wake Up & Reclaim America
page contained over 5,000 pages, a sampling
of 1,000 pages were manually categorised,
representing 18.8% of the total. While 67.8% of
these were right-leaning pro-Trump pages, most
other pages covered topics reflected in Trump’s
campaign rhetoric, such as pro-Christian, anti-
Muslim, pro-military, pro-police, anti-immigration,