By SUSAN JONES
One of the Pitt professors getting national exposure during this election season hasn’t even officially started teaching at the University, but his topic is one of great interest.
BOOK AWARD
In September, Samuel Woolley won the Association of Internet Researchers’ Nancy Baym Book Annual Award.
According to the association committee, “Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity” (Yale University Press) addresses one of the most important issues in contemporary internet research — the rise of computational and algorithmic propaganda that affects social media users globally.
Samuel Woolley is the inaugural William S. Dietrich II Endowed Chair in Disinformation Studies and an associate professor in the Department of Communication. He joined Pitt at the beginning of October and will begin teaching here next semester.
“Sam Woolley’s scholarship, research and well-respected status as a public intellectual make him an immediate asset to the Dietrich School and the University of Pittsburgh,” according to a statement from the Dietrich School. “We’re thrilled to have him join our Department of Communication and look forward to the many contributions he is certain to make in the classroom and to his discipline.”
Disinformation differs from misinformation, Woolley says. While misinformation is the accidental spread of false information, disinformation involves coordinated dissemination of falsehoods.
Election campaigns have always had their fair share of disinformation, but the coordinated falsehoods also can be found around science, climate change and certainly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The internet has given us so many ways to find information, but with that, it’s also made it so that anyone can find the information that most agrees with their perspective,” Woolley said. “We live in a time where there’s this exciting democratization of access to information, but we also live in a time where trust in the news media and in institutions like medicine and science are at all-time lows.”
His research looks at why trust in these institutions is so low, “what it is that causes the polarization that we see in our country and around the world right now, and how technology plays a role in all of that, especially the internet and social media. And then what can be done about it.”
Woolley says his major interest is “at the intersection of politics and emerging technology” or computational propaganda. This looks at how technology can be used to amplify falsehoods.
This field of study can sometimes be seen as controversial, Woolley says, “because the people who like to spread disinformation don’t like people to study it, and they don’t like journalists to track it. They don’t like to be called out for doing this. And so oftentimes there’s a lot of backlash against this kind of research.”
He said that the more elected office and people in positions of power spread disinformation, “the harder it gets for regular citizens like us and like me to combat it, because sometimes the people who study disinformation end up having disinformation spread about them.”
Woolley comes to Pitt from the University of Texas, where he was the program director and founder of the Propaganda Research Lab in the Moody College of Communication. The move to Pennsylvania, a key swing state, puts him in the heart of election propaganda, which he’s looking forward to studying.
“I think that there are different challenges associated with studying disinformation in Texas than there are with studying disinformation in Pennsylvania,” he said. “No state is perfect, but Texas has a very different record when it comes to voters rights, for instance, and disinformation plays a huge role in attempting to take away voting rights from people, to disenfranchise people. Pennsylvania has a markedly better record than Texas.”
Social media and the truth
After the 2016 election, with the data breach of Cambridge Analytica and Russian intervention in the U.S. election, Woolley said there was more bipartisan concern about political disinformation in particular and ways to combat it.
“With Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (in 2022), we’ve seen some very worrisome regression in terms of platforms’ content moderation,” he said. “Musk and and some others like him in this space claim that they want to support free speech at all costs. But the worrisome thing is that we actually see the reverse occurring on those platforms, that speech is becoming less free and less protected and less safe simultaneously.”
Woolley told ABC News last month that Musk is “a very powerful individual using not only his ownership of the platform but also his ability to control massive swaths of engagement on the platform for his own benefit and for the benefit of his political allies."
There seems to be more media literacy about these issues and people are more aware that disinformation is being used to manipulate them, Woolley said. Some states also have started to hold accountable people who knowingly spread falsehoods.
Some argue that any attempt to monitor and police social media sites infringes on free speech. But Woolley said that “systematic content moderation is a win for everyone in democracy, when there’s a set of clear rules. Because without content moderation, my research suggests that platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are actually winner-take-all systems when it comes to popularity.
“If you have more resources, if you have more know-how, if you can hire fancy PR firms and deploy armies of AI bots, you can actually functionally control the conversation a lot more effectively than the average person on the street. I think there’s an illusion of the open marketplace of ideas on these platforms, and there’s not a real open marketplace of ideas.”
He said he’s hopeful we will see more action in terms of policy, media literacy programs and solutions to this problem, including criminalization of the most nefarious types of disinformation and propaganda where there is a clear violation of the law and clear victims.
Fighting election disinformation
When interviewed in early October, Woolley said there was already a huge amount of disinformation surrounding the presidential election and it would only become worse.
He said that marginalized communities often are the target of the most widespread targeted disinformation, because they can be critical voting blocs, and marginalized communities have historically been used as scapegoats, such as the Trump campaign targeting Haitian immigrants, “and so I think people really have to be on their guard for this kind of content.”
“We have to remember that we have the tools of science and of observation and of good information versus bad information, and good research versus bad research, and that we should rely upon those things … leading up to the election,” Woolley said.
Propaganda and disinformation have been around forever, he said, but are worse now, “because we live in an information environment where we’re constantly bombarded with content from all sides and from all sorts of people. I think people need to remember what their values are. They need to actually do their own homework to figure out where candidates stand on issues and not just allow themselves to be led. And folks need to remember that politicians have a vested interest in getting them to be mad and getting them to vote based upon emotion rather than vote based upon logic.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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