Amplification and Personalization: The impact of metrics, analytics, and algorithms on public discourse and democracy

Amplification and
personalization:
The Impact of Metrics, Analytics,
and Algorithms on
Public Discourse and Democracy
Dr. Nicole Blanchett Neheli
Sheridan College
@NicoleBlanchett
redefiningjournalism.wordpress.com

What we’re going to talk
about…
• Impact of metrics and analytics on news practice (findings from my
international, ethnographic study)
• Your digital footprint, psychometrics, personalization
• The quest for clicks and click fraud
• Filter bubbles, echo chambers, amplification, and political discourse
• Mis/disinformation campaigns
• Values and versions of truth
• Improving discourse: BEPAS
©Nicole Blanchett Neheli

Cross-cultural Commonalities
at Sites of Study
(Blanchett Neheli 2018; 2019a; 2019b; 2019c)
• “Doing well” — the importance of volume metrics (often related to
targets/quotas), but recognition traffic doesn’t, necessarily, reflect
quality or relevance
• Differing methodologies/editorial standards for different platforms
(also noted by Usher 2018)
• “Enhancing” stories, headline testing (also see Hagar & Diakopoulos
2019)
• The need for pictures to “enhance” and promote stories on the web,
which can result in stories with better pictures being better promoted
• Dayparting, platform-parting (Hanusch 2017), and “de-selection”
(Tandoc 2014)

• Fighting for the audience, developing formats/processes to
increase reach and engagement
• Reliance on social media, particularly Facebook, for
reach/community building, Twitter as tool to live stream/take
notes, “shareability” (see also Harcup & O’Neill 2017; Ekström &
Westlund 2019)
• Relentless pace in short-staffed newsrooms, “assembly-line” or
“factory-like” production, continual addition of tasks to meet
digital demands, uncertain futures (see also Cohen 2015; 2018)
• Need to spend money to create work flows/processes that lead
to best practice re use of metrics & analytics, but few
organizations have adequate resources to do so
Commonalities con’t…

Clarification of Terms
Metrics are units of measurement that reflect a
specific element of audience behaviour
Analytics encompass the analysis of audience data
as a means of performance appraisal on existing
content and the development of hypotheses to
improve audience engagement in the future
Analytics systems are platforms specifically
designed to aggregate, display, and assist in the
reporting and analysis of audience data.
(Blanchett Neheli 2018)

Psychometrics are native to advertising and marketing
and, traditionally, use five primary factors to measure
personality traits/values that are used to predict a
target audience’s preferences:
• Openness to experience
• Conscientiousness
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism
(Bay 2018)

Your digital footprint…
When you consume content on the internet your behaviour is
“measured” in a number of ways:
• Where you go
• How you arrived
• Where you’re from (location)
• What type of device you’re using
• What you look at/read
• How long you look at it/read it
• Where you stop reading/looking
(For general information on how data is collected on you as you browse—for example, from your browser
and/or cookies—see Nield 2017)

Google & Facebook store TONS of
YOUR data…
*For full thread see Curran 2018

Previous Consumption =
Personalization
• Cambridge Analytica Facebook breach is commonly cited reference for
impact of psychometrics—data from personality quiz were used to target
voters with misinformation—though, new research shows that could have
had limited effects (Venturini and Rogers 2019)
• Personalization is based on a web of recorded consumption of
content/behaviour—data often collected and stored without your
knowledge
• Content creators/analytics platforms/social media platforms use particular
algorithms to determine what you might like based on past behaviour—
what will make you “click” (eg. James the news butler, see Newman 2018)
• What’s “trending” in social media can also have a big impact on which
stories are promoted, and how information is further spread via social
media/picked up by media organizations

The Manipulation of
Mainstream Media
“The emphasis on quantifiable metrics stacks the news
cycle with stories most likely to generate the highest level
of engagement possible, across as many platforms as
possible. Things traveling too far, too fast, with too much
emotional urgency, is exactly the point, but these are also
the conditions that can create harm”(Phillips 2018).
“The media’s dependence on social media, analytics and
metrics, sensationalism, novelty over newsworthiness,
and clickbait makes them vulnerable to such media
manipulation” (Marwick and Lewis 2017).

The Lens of Media Logic…
“…the technological and organizational contexts through
which ‘news events’ must pass provide newsworkers with a
framework for routinely suiting these events to both visual
and temporal parameters” (Altheide & Snow 1979; see also Altheide 2004;2017).
• The grammar of news, emerging formats/narratives for web
engagement
• Content as revenue source, processes aimed at expediency versus
enlightenment, placing importance on popularity versus relevance
• Narrowed frames of reference that impact public discourse
• Formats can be replicated to give false content credence/make biased
or ideologically-skewed information appear to be “news”

Click Farms…
Courtesy ppcprotect.com
What you click on is also tied to advertising page
impressions, which makes clickbait tempting for content
producers, and opens up the door for fraud.

(Graphic from Google and White Ops 2018)
“Cursor movements and clicks are faked and multiple viewability measures
are faked to further mimic observed trends in human behavior” (White Ops
2016).
The Quest for Clicks & Advertising Fraud

The power of formatting:
“Mock” news…
“…the exploitation of the conventionalized forms of news and the related discourse of factuality…The principle
behind the information is masked. The purpose of doing so is often linked to political and/or economic interests”
(Ekstrom and Westlund 2019).

Courtesy BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/the_godfather_of_fake_news
Money Trumps Ideology:
The Case of Christopher Blair

Filter Bubbles &
Echo Chambers
• Echo chambers reflect “connectivity”—“closed groups vs.
overlapping publics” (Bruns 2019)
• Filter bubbles reflect “communication”—“deliberate exclusion
vs. widespread sharing” (Bruns 2019)
• Filter bubbles and echo chambers are a documented concern
(LaFrance nd; Frizzera 2018; Mahler 2016; Pariser 2011)
• A growing body of research suggests that their negative impact
is exaggerated (Freelon 2017; Dubois Blank 2018; Bruns 2019)

“…even if you ignore the existence of filter
bubbles and echo chambers and assume that
every voter is equally exposed to the different
sources of information, every other piece of
influential, election-related news seen by voters
through Twitter, was false or misleading.
When half the news stories conveyed in this
manner are misleading, it can result in the
crowding out of useful, truthful information,
which then becomes more difficult to obtain”
(Bay 2018).

Amplification is the primary
issue…
• Amplification of mis/disinformation or stories with a
particular bias covered by mainstream media has
tremendous impact on discourse (Marwick and Lewis
2017; Faris et al. 2017; Wardle and Derakhshan 2017)
• Mis/disinformation spreads rapidly (Vosoughi et al.
2018) and remains active online even after corrections
are made (Solomon 2018)
• Mis/disinformation also continues to spread because
there is an “endless tail” (Blanchett Neheli 2019a)

Courtesy politco.com
What’s trending can create a web of
stories….

It’s not kids these days…
“Facebook users ages 65 and older shared
more than twice as many fake news articles
than the next-oldest age group of 45 to 65,
and nearly seven times as many fake news
articles as the youngest age group (18 to
29)”(Hazard Owen 2019, quoting Newton).

•83% of the mapped [Twitter] accounts that spread
disinformation during the 2016 U.S. election still active as
of May 2109—publishing more than a million tweets in a
typical day, casting doubts on Twitter’s ability to “police”
content (Hindman & Barash 2019)
•“The fake news that matters most is not organic, small-
scale or spontaneous. Most fake news on Twitter links to
a few established conspiracy and propaganda sites, and
coordinated campaigns play a crucial role in spreading
fake news”—getting rid of largest sites “greatly reduces”
spread of misinformation (Hindman & Barash 2018)
The spread of mis/disinformation
is often highly coordinated…

1. Disinformation: The fabrication or deliberate distortion of news
content aimed at deceiving an audience, polluting the
information space to obscure fact-based reality, and
manufacturing misleading narratives about key events or issues
to manipulate public opinion
2. Political Advertising: Using a fake identity or non-attributable
false-front account to purchase online political ads, primarily on
social media sites, to propagate disinformation about certain
political parties, candidates, issues, or public figures.
3. Sentiment Amplification: The use of fake accounts, trolls,
and/or automated bots on social media and other online fora
(e.g., the comments sections of newspapers) to spread
disinformation and inflate the prominence of particular
narratives.
4. Identity Falsification: The establishment of a fake online
identity, either by an individual or a group, which is used for
false-front interaction with target audiences.
5. Hack and Leak Operations: The theft of emails or documents
through hacking or phishing operations, followed by their
strategic public release, typically via proxy to prevent
attribution.
6. Reconnaissance Hacking: Hacking operations against state
institutions or publicly influential organisations such as think
tanks, NGOs, and media organisations.
7. Infrastructure Attacks: Infrastructure attacks encompass a
variety of specific cyber tactics. Broadly, they involve any
attempt to penetrate a country’s electronic voting system, voter
databases, or related IT networks.
8. Elite Co-optation: The cultivation of favourable relationships
with key public- and private-sector elites.
9. Party or Campaign Financing: The overt or covert provision of
funding to a particular party or election campaign, typically
through a proxy institution without direct links to the Kremlin.
10.Extreme Intervention: The use of hard power to intervene in a
country’s political developments and democratic process,
typically via overt or covert military action cushioned within a
broader hybrid framework that violates the target country’s
territorial sovereignty.

• “Isolated conversations” on right-wing outlets like Breitbart “proved
immensely powerful in setting the broader agenda of the 2016
presidential campaign” because they were “actively shopped to the
broader media conversation” (Faris et al. 2017)
• Few people read what they share, assumptions/knowledge often
built and shared based on reading a headline (Gabielkov et al.
2016; Stuart nd)
• Disproportionate popularity on Facebook is a strong indicator of
highly partisan and unreliable media (Faris et al. 2017)
• Facebook has removed billions of fake accounts, but there are more
fake accounts than ever before (see Silverman 2019)

Preventing Interference in
Canada
• Bill C-76 requires platforms to keep registry of political &
partisan ads published directly or indirectly (see
openparliament.ca)
• Facebook “Ad Library” is attempt to confirm the identities of
those purchasing political ads (see Shekar 2019)
• Google has banned political ads claiming it can’t enforce
policy, as have many top websites (see Thompson 2019
and Cardoso 2019)
• Texts and YouTube videos are a way to get around
restrictions (Masse 2019)

Canada’s Digital Charter
(Government of Canada 2019)

• “…for those who might stumble across them, reports
from distant and distrusted experts are no match for
closely held values and defining identities.”
• “Those with extreme value commitments are much more
certain than others that their perceptions are correct.”
• “Education provides the tools to more efficiently match
their preferred values to their perceived facts” (all of the
above Barker and Marietta 2019; see also boyd 2018).
• We are wired to accept collective knowledge, but it’s
easier to believe what “feels” right (Sloman & Rabb
2016).
Truth as a matter of perspective…

A clear
divide on
social media

How to stop misinformation
• Slow down—think before you retweet or share
• Look at where info comes from, including byline/creator, publication
date
• Are credible sources/documents cited?
• Is anyone else sharing this information and, if so, who and why?
• Does the content intend “to inform in a dispassionate way or rather play
to emotions and seek to persuade, sell, incite or exploit”?
• How might you be biased towards the content? Are you seeking
“information or confirmation”?
• Can you responsibly share the content?
(from Miller 2019)

Read the about section/check a publication’s bias rating

1. Broaden Perspective: Look for reliable sources that don’t share your ideology, do you
have all available versions of an event/story?
2. Evaluate Information: Have you read/watched what you’re sharing? Have you tried to
link back to the original source/video/article/report being discussed? Was it interpreted
appropriately?
3. Provide Context: When sharing information, is there anything you can add to supply
further context? A link to a more comprehensive article or supporting evidence?
4. Assess Impact: What are potential ramifications of sharing content/providing
information? Who might benefit from the information you are sharing? [eg. facial
recognition & Facebook’s 10-year challenge (see Martin 2019)].
5. Stop Amplifying: Don’t highlight mis/disinformation by showcasing it—don’t redistribute
out of context/clickbaity quotes, share video, or bad headlines verbatim—instead supply
good information (see 3) and promote positive media logic.
Improving Information
Flow: BEPAS

• Metrics and analytics are neutral tools, their use and
interpretation are what impact information sharing and
discourse, but revenue systems and ingrained
processes can trigger poor practice
• It’s important to understand how your behaviour creates
a web of data
• Take responsibility for your potential role in the spread
of mis/disinformation and how you might negatively
influence or improve discourse—own your impact!
Finally…

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