Everything Is All About Branding: Social Media And Reputation Management In Politics
Brittany Kaiser, former Cambridge Analytica business development director turned whistle-blower, revealed two years ago that the family of the late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos contacted the controversial British political consulting firm asking to help them rebrand their image with the use of social media.
This revelation represents what many democratic societies are dealing with now in the face of the intensifying dependence of society on social media: Branding/Rebranding and reputation management of many politicians and political factions.
People and experts alike had every reason to be worried about the assault on people’s critical thinking after hearing this news. The Marcos family is infamous for running dry the Philippine economy. The Marcos patriarch, Ferdinand, served as president of the Southeast Asian country from 1965 to 1986, a period described as the darkest period in the country’s contemporary history. His presidency even held the Guinness World Record for Greatest Robbery of a Government.
Cambridge Analytica, on the other hand, is being blamed as the mastermind, or at least the brain, behind the rise of many populists in parts of the world. A New York Times investigation found out that the company had a role in the campaign of Donald Trump in 2016 by exploiting user data. It also allegedly helped manipulate the information ecology in India in 2010, Mexico for the 2018 elections, and even in its home country The United Kingdom during the public debate on the UK Brexit Referendum.
Reputation management and social media
A glimpse at the history of propaganda suggests the word is not inherently wrong. Its main goal, with full intent, is to change the behavior or beliefs of its audience. Scholars from the social sciences and the humanities see such activity as simultaneously a philosophical, psychological, rhetorical and sociological concept (Cunningham, 2002).
An example of propaganda that is either neutral or positive is the time when ancient Greeks used dramas, religious festivals, and arts to push their political, social, and moral teachings. The same can be said of materials produced to push for American independence.
Today, propaganda has earned a negative connotation, thanks to the advent of mass media in the late 1900s and now, social media. Both mediums are said to have produced the feeling of jingoism among people. Propaganda also became public relations and nobody can escape the information they do not want to read or hear because of the media.
The hacking of democracy through social media
The World Wide Web sure democratized the traditional media with everyone who has access to the internet and social media sites. What is present to the public is an unfiltered information ecosystem as well as the access to make themselves heard in a few clicks.
The hypodermic needle theory posits that an intended message is directly received and wholly accepted by the receiver. That media knows its target and a passive audience is directly affected by this message. This is true to a certain extent for social media users.
In America, one-third of people turn to social media for their news fix according to Pew Research Center. This while the traditional media trust continues to fall. A 2021 Elderman study revealed that the pandemic saw an eight percent drop in trust in traditional media from 2020’s 61 percent. While this is still above 50 percent, 59 percent of those surveyed believe journalists deliberately mislead people about certain issues.
Modern dictators and populists point people to an enemy. The common denominator between Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Benito Mussolini, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Rodrigo Duterte, and Donald Trump is their efforts to control the truth, taken from the very pages of a dictator’s playbook, specifically of Russia’s Joseph Stalin. That the real enemy is the media.
Donald Trump, who won in 2016 US Elections allegedly through the help of Cambridge Analytica, used that. Duterte of the Philippines, which is regarded as the ‘patient zero’ of the misinformation endemic, also attacked the media, had its top broadcast network ABS-CBN shut down, and jailed Rappler news CEO Maria Ressa who then won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021.
Reputation management is something that is done in public relations to iron out or promote an image of a brand or a personality. Social media has made this job easier. Social media reputation management includes the utilization of social media sites. Be it written content or short videos that are quick and easy to watch like Tiktok and Instagram’s Reels.
However, no regulations are making sure that the information being released is factual. And this is what makes reputation management dangerous politics-wise.
Modern authoritarians have simple steps to control the people. First, they attack the media. Then sell themselves as someone different from these so-called enemies. Then sell this brand.
All these modern-day populists do is talk in front of the media they are attacking as they have their ‘social media warriors’ to complete the job for them. The so-called troll farms or click farms. These are paid commentators, trolls, and even social media accounts whose main job is to distort the through by spreading a fake one. They also spread propaganda about the enemy of the entity they are working for or good things about the entity that is paying them. In 2017, The Telegraph found out that at least 30 governments have employed keyboard armies.
These trolls are like the gardeners who maintain the reputation of the people paying them while at the same time ruining the image of those who are on the other side of a political campaign.
Psychographics is a behavioral analysis that is part of the reputation management conducted by Cambridge Analytica. William Wells defined psychographics as the “qualitative methodology of studying consumers based on psychological characteristics and traits such as values, desires, goals, interests, and lifestyle choices.” As a marketing strategy, psychographics deal with understanding the consumer's emotions and values, giving you better information on how to market your products to them.
Facebook was criticized for doing a secret psychological experiment in 2012 on its users by tampering with their newsfeeds. The company hid positive posts and filled 700,000 users’ news feeds with negative ones to determine if it can alter what its users could feel upon seeing a post.
Many populists and politicians in the world sell themselves as some kind of brand. And many of them were said to have made deals or benefited from deals made on their behalf with Cambridge Analytica which collected millions of user data from Facebook.
Donald Trump and his allies sell themselves as the champion of the cry of Americans who feel like they have been neglected by big politics, to fight off illegal immigrants that are destroying the fabric of American values. Philippines’ Duterte’s brand is ‘The Punisher’ who will stop at nothing to kill drug lords and addicts. Brexit is a brand. Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, Erdogan, Modi are all political brands. To sum up, they all promote jingoism or ultra-nationalism.
Jingoism is the excessively biased view of one’s own country. The state either promotes or adapts a war-like foreign policy. This political ideology is observed by Indian journalist Dwaipayan Bose of the Hindustan Times on the ongoing India-Pakistan conflict which utilizes mass media and social media to promote ultra-nationalism. He said:
"For years now, the media of both nations have been fighting a proxy war that is blurring out factual and unbiased coverage of events in the subcontinent. Overly nationalistic posturing and jingoism lie at the heart of this. Journalists, columnists, TV anchors and analysts of one country are busy exposing the ‘bias’ and ‘hypocrisy’ of the other, and in the process, adding insult to a 64-year-old injury."
Social media businesses are profit not for protecting democracy
It does not help, too, that the algorithm of social media rewards such behavior. Law professors from Harvard University have declared that social media’s business model is not compatible with democracy.
“You have to appeal to the [Facebook] algorithm to get elected; you have to appeal to the algorithm to get attention. The algorithm has primacy over media, over the news, over newspaper publishers, over each of us, and it controls what we do," said ethicist Tristan Harris who was among those present during the only discussion.
The professors also chided tech giants Google and Facebook saying they have already done damage to democracy.
Think of the time you were watching a funny video on Youtube. The recommendations you will get from the platform are pretty much similar to what you are currently seeing. Another instance is when you make a simple search for something you want to buy or watch on Facebook. Next thing you know, your feed is filled with ads similar to what you just searched.
This should not be that worrying for personal searches and enjoyment. What if it is politics?
Another thing that does not help in this fight against misinformation is human nature.
How does human nature help the spread of fake news?
Tech companies experimenting on human minds without their permission is problematic. However, humans have a role here, too. Human nature to be specific. Soroush Vosoughi and associate professor Deb Roy, both of the MIT Media Lab, and MIT Sloan professor Sinan Aral tried to answer the question “Why do people fall for fake news?”
A study done by the group found out that it has something to do with humans' preference for something 'new’. They called this experiment the ‘novelty hypothesis.’ The study ran from 2006 to 2017. It observed about 4.5 million tweets comprising of both factual and false news which had more engagement. The researchers removed bots and found out that even without them, the false news was still tweeted more times compared to the positive ones.
“This suggests that false news spreads farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it,” the researchers wrote.
Sloan said novelty attracts engagement because they are surprising and emotionally arousing. He added that these tweets confer social status on the part of the sharer because they will make them feel like they have insider information or are part of some exclusive club.
Information overload
The limitation of the human brain is another way how fake news spreads faster on social media, leaving more room for reputation management to lord over the truth. The internet has become a minefield of cognitive bias. Information can come from everywhere because of the democratization of the media. It can come from anyone who is an expert in the field, a person you idolize, or a close friend. The human brain can’t process an avalanche of information and so, they do mental shortcuts. To accept only the things they agree with.
Not to mention that humans also prefer things that are summarized or facilitated. Because of these human characteristics, memes, short clips, and micro-blogging sites become instant truth, especially if they get repeated over and over on the newsfeed, by the people they know or they admire.
Data is a commodity, (Mis)information is a weapon for populists
Vijay Cherukuri, CEO of Infolob, sees data as the most precious commodity these days as it can predict consumer behavior. The key today is understanding individual customers, customers who also surrender their data online based on their searches, likes, and any other engagement on social media.
Political entities also see data this way. Anyone can hack democracy through propaganda and reputation management made easy by social media. Made easier by companies like Cambridge Analytica if left unchecked.
Democracy can be hacked. People in democratic societies vote not through their intelligence or logic but emotions. All dictators and populists need to do are to point people to an enemy or a problem. Some of these can be true, some are not. If big data is a commodity, hatred can be a currency. This is something Hitler did during the Nazi era. That the very reason for people’s misery is a certain group of people.
The misinformation age has brought about historical distortion agents that serve only a few people. Brittany Kaiser said selling a political brand is easy because of Big Data and social media. The past can be revised.
But we must always remember what dystopian author George Orwell said, “He who controls the past, controls the future.”
