30/06/2024, 09:47 Astroturf lobbying tactics will rule the politics of the future

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TECH & INNOVATION

Say goodbye to grassroots politics. The future is made of Astroturf

The era of legitimate public uprisings may be behind us. Image: Reuters/Mark Kauzlarich

By Samuel WoolleyPublished September 25, 2018

This story is part of What Happens Next, our complete guide to understanding the future.
Read more predictions about the Future of Fact.

If the world we live in today is already being described as “post-truth,” how will it be
described in 10 or 20 years? It’s hard to imagine today’s major social media companies
like Facebook and Twitter continuing their roles as our digital linchpins. Given their
recent failures to protect democratic information flows, they risk becoming “legacy”
social media companies as quickly as they became “new” media.

“Post-post truth” doesn’t exactly have a ring to it, but it’s the most literal moniker for our
future communication ecosystem. On the one hand, the digital sphere could become an
enforced environment: a realm of constant identity verification, with real-time social bot
eradication and digital disinformation police. On the other, it may look like a post-
modern spectacle where ground truths are always questioned and confusion reigns
supreme. The reality will likely combine features from both, with control oscillating
between vindicators and vigilantes.

Any changes to technology or media will have serious consequences for culture and
consumers. If the future world is even less grounded in fact than it currently is—more

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30/06/2024, 09:47 Astroturf lobbying tactics will rule the politics of the future

bound up in partisan mythology and a digital marketplace that rewards lies with profit—
how will society be affected?

“Computational propaganda will be the fake news of the future.

”
The answer will not be decided democratically, but by computational propagandists.
Computational propaganda is the attempt to manipulate public opinion through
automation and algorithmic systems. On a basic level, nefarious actors use sites like
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to artificially spread political junk. A lot of this is pure
spam, intended to gum-up online conversations among activists or political opposition.
During the recent Mexican election, for instance, political bots in the form of automated
fake profiles were used to impair communication between activists. Other tactics are
targeted and more sophisticated, using coordinated human users alongside automated
social media accounts to promote particular ideas to various social groups. We most
recently saw these techniques during the Russian and Iranian campaigns built to
influence the 2018 US midterms.

Rather than grassroots politics, the future is made of Astroturf. The goal of these
communication strategies is to amplify or suppress political information through lies and
confusion. Those who use it manufacture false consensus and give the illusion of
popularity or disapproval. This creates a bandwagon effect—and the more people who
jump on the bandwagon, the harder it will be to slow it down.

The continued rise in public consciousness of conspiracy movements like Pizzagate or

QAnon makes it harder to reverse the flow of disinformation. Combined with the social
fallout associated with disinformation, many tremendously powerful technology
companies are being brought to a very public mea culpa moment. It seems that every
week Twitter, Google, or Facebook are implicated in a new propaganda scandal. They are
being (rightfully) forced to keep up with the Alex Joneses of the world, trying to
preordain how conspiracy peddlers will game their algorithms next. Any fault to not
mitigate this is their own: the tools that today’s tech behemoths have created grew so
fast, and with such disregard for introspection, that they’ve become unmanageable.

A screen capture from @DyanNations, one of several hundred accounts conservative strategist
Patrick Ruffini alleged was used to attack Ted Cruz on behalf of Donald Trump. In addition to
tweeting pro-Trump messages, the account regularly sent out Russian memes and ads for fake
followers. Image: Author's screengrab, 6/15/17

As people become aware of the mélange of propaganda and scams on open social media
networks like Twitter, they will move to closed networks like WhatsApp. But this exodus

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30/06/2024, 09:47 Astroturf lobbying tactics will rule the politics of the future

from public channels has its own problems, including the worsening of echo chambers.
It’ll become harder to connect with verifiable information on the outside web as these
apps become walled gardens.

In an attempt to stymie problems before they arise, platforms will become increasingly
privacy oriented, barring peoples’ connections to unknown users and using tougher and
tougher verification methods. They will effectively be publicly regulated, if not by
governments then by public opinion. While politics remains hogtied by its own
partisanship and a lack of understanding of new media, citizens will act the role of a
mercurial public jury. Companies’ PR campaigns about what they are doing to address
disinformation will continue to grow, and they will become more transparent about the
groups working to manipulate their platforms and the algorithms that allow for said
manipulation.

But if social media companies, governments, and the public don’t begin to generate
actual solutions to this problem—rather than one-dimensional transparency reports—
then the next generation of children may be born into a world where it is nearly
impossible to tell truth from fiction both on and offline. Some groups are already working
on ideas. My own lab at the Institute for the Future recently collaborated with game
designer Jane McGonigal and the Omidyar Network to develop the Ethical OS Toolkit, a
series of future-focused exercises geared toward helping tech designers develop digital
products that consider the benefit of society. Groups like Witness put digital power in the
hands of the people by allowing citizens to produce videos that work to protect human
rights. More ideas are popping up everywhere—good, bad and in-between: using
blockchain for verification and voting; structural banning of social bots; and doing away
with online anonymity.

Whatever happens, we cannot go back to where we were; social media and the internet
are no longer blindly assumed to be vehicles for democracy and the open flow of
information. In the vacuum that has been created, there is space for the next generation
of actors to promote a new vision of online communication. In order for this to happen,
however, they themselves must not get sucked into the vacuum of conspiracy and
confusion.

This story is part of What Happens Next, our complete guide to understanding the future.
Read more predictions about the Future of Fact.

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