Participatory Propaganda in Seven Simple Steps

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Liberal-Leaning Media Facebook Page Network
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carried anti-Semitic undertones. The Trump
campaign’s response was that the media and
others had it all wrong, that this symbol was, in
fact, a Sheriff’s star. The entire episode becomes
yet another example to Trump supporters that the
liberal media is biased against him. This event also
demonstrates the participatory propaganda model
in action – drawing from supposed user-generated
content, thus indicating grassroots support.
Such scandals helped keep Trump in the media.
Trump enjoyed more media mentions, both on TV
and online than the other candidates. 124 Indeed, by
the start of the primary election campaign in early
2016, Trump had been enjoying “more nightly
news coverage than the entire Democratic field
combined.” 125
COMMUNE WITH THE NEWS
It would appear that the relationship between
media, politicians, and online communities,
however, is also very symbiotic.
The Colombia Journalism Review identified a “right
wing media network anchored around Breitbart”
in analysing more than 1.25 million stories posted
online from 1 April 2015 to 8 November 2016. This
“distinct and insulated media system” used social
media to spread a “hyper-partisan perspective”,
but also “strongly influenced the broader media
agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.” 126
Likewise, similar results were found in analysing
the liberal- and conservative-leaning media outlets.
The liberal-leaning media group, visualised
here below, consists of seven almost entirely
independent communities. This visualisation uses
Gephi’s stronger gravity function to keep the
communities closer together for ease of viewing;
however, they are not linked so closely in reality.
What’s more, the Facebook pages tend to be
grouped into ‘ego networks’, meaning any given