PUBLIC RELATIONS AND SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE POST- … 8A_Puchan McWhirter.pdf · • Jowett, G.S, and...
Transcript of PUBLIC RELATIONS AND SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE POST- … 8A_Puchan McWhirter.pdf · • Jowett, G.S, and...
PUBLIC RELATIONS AND SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE POST-TRUTH ERAUSING CONCEPT AND CRITIQUES OF PROPAGANDA TO ASSESS POST-TRUTH SOCIAL
MEDIA ENVIRONMENTS AND DATA ETHICS
DR. ANDREW MCWHIRTER
DR. HEIKE PUCHAN
GLASGOW CALEDONIAN UNIVERSITY
AIM
• To explore the relevance of concepts of propaganda for public relations and social media in the post-truth era
• To highlight the importance of data ethics
• To use a case-study approach to demonstrate how social media discourse is changing communication practices of propaganda and public relations
DEFINING PROPAGANDA
• Propaganda, from New Latin, propagare to Propagate
• From religious doctrines seeking to spread … to theera of ‘spreadable media’ (Jenkins, 2013) in digital space
• The core of propaganda is faith and faith is nevermoretested than with fake news (kernels of truth/believability) or post-truths (emotional investment)
• Although twinned with ‘P’olitics today one should never forget these innate characteristics
• Even if Bernays (1928) infused politics and commerce as one when he wrote on and practiced propaganda
Propaganda is understood by some as the “deliberate, systematic attempt to shape Perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist” (Jowett & O’Donnell, 2015: 7)
Recent development in thinking that propaganda is a form of strategic communication whichis employed by corporations, politicians, terrorist groups alike (see e.g. Wilbur, 2017)
DEFINING PROPAGANDA
SOCIAL MEDIA RESEARCH ETHICS
• Increasingly of mainstream academic interest since Association of Internet Researchers Ethical Decision Making Report (2012 – ten year update to 2002 report)
• Same historical research ethics apply but can be more pronounced or need to be reconfigured for digital space
• Data ethics is the hot topic for commerce and academia moving to 2020
• Did a US retail store really know a 16-year old girl was pregnant before her parents did? And did London café users really promise to give away their first-born children for free wi-fi?
METHODS
Case Study: technology, commerce, media and consumer discoursesaround Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (2017)
Niche search engines: Boardreader, BuzzSumo, Tweetdeck, Delve
Open Data Analytics software COSMOS (Burnap, et al. 2014)
Part ‘big data’ API trawling according to the Three Vs definition (citedIn Staff et al. 2016:4)
Not data scientists so qualitative content analysis deployed!
Amit Agarwal, founder of Digital inspiration (2004-) and India’s ‘first professional blogger’.
CASE STUDY: TRACING PROPAGANDA VIA BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (2017)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVDQpwNIBCoNews Views 16 March 2017
MACHINE LEARNING
MORAL PANIC
CASE STUDY: TRACING PROPAGANDA VIA BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (2017)
ONE MONTH ON COSMOS SOFTWARE 24HR (19-20 APRIL ) DATA ANALYSIS REVEALS DISCOURSE CONTINUES ON TWITTER WITH ‘GAY’ AND ‘BANNED’ KEY WORDS STILL DOMINATING DISCUSSIONS
MEMECULTURE
CASE STUDY: TRACING PROPAGANDA VIA BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (2017)
COSMOS SHOWS KEY TWEET AND RE-TWEET SOURCES… TWEETDECK LINK TO ORIGINAL SOURCE
…AND POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE SENTIMENT SCORES (SENTISTRENGTH)…
… AND GENDER BREAKDOWN – OR HOW DIFFICULT IT IS TO ASCERTAIN THIS VIA TWITTER PROFILES, POSTS AND AVATARS?
COMBINED WITH QUALITATIVE CONTENT SEARCHES USING DELVE AND TWITTER SEARCH KEYS IT IS CLEAR THAT COUNTER DISCOURSES ARE ABUNDANT IN THE INTERIM PERIOD
COMBINED WITH QUALITATIVE CONTENT SEARCHES USING DELVE AND TWITTER SEARCH KEYS IT IS CLEAR THAT COUNTER DISCOURSES ARE ABUNDANT IN THE INTERIM PERIOD
… AND IN PARTICULAR REMIX AND MEME CULTURES
CONCLUSIONS• Data ethics and social media research methods must be considered at the outset of
any online research and also continually as that research develops.
• Considerations here have been given to harm (mainly reputational), ToS, the subject/author frame, and ownership of the reproduced/researched content
• Multiple free tools were used from more bespoke search engines to big data gathering software
• Here we can see three layers of propaganda: commerce, moral panic discourses, and finally consumer and user counter-propaganda.
• It is in the final forms that social media excels via humour and meme culture and perhaps for the first time could suggest something other than a purely negative representation of propaganda in action
BIBLIOGRAPHY• Beaulieu, Anne and Estalella, Adolfo (2012) 'Rethinking research ethics for mediated settings' in Information,
Communication & Society Vol. 15, No. 1, pp.23-42.• Bernays, Edward [2005] (1928) Propaganda. New York: IG Publishing. • Burnap, P., Rana, O., Williams, M., Housley, W., Edwards, A., Morgan, J, Sloan, L. and Conejero, J. (2014) ‘COSMOS:
Towards an Integrated and Scalable Service for Analyzing Social Media on Demand’, International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems.
• Clark, Karin et al (2015) Guidelines for the ethical use of data in human research, The University of Melbourne• Dijck, José van (2013) The culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.• Jenkins, Henry, Joshua E. Greene, and Sam Ford (2013) Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked
culture. New York: New York University Press.• Hasselbalch, Gry and Tranberg, Pernille (2016) Data Ethics: The New Competitive Advantage. PubliShare.• Kaplan, A. M., & Haenlein, M. (2010). ‘Users of the world, unite! The Challenges and opportunities of social media’.
Business Horizons, 59-69.• Jowett, G.S, and O’Donnell, V. (2015) Propaganda and Persuasion, 5th ed. Los Angeles: Sage.• L’Etang, Jacquie (2006) ‘Public Relations and Propaganda: Conceptual Issues, Methodological Problems and Public
Relations Discourse’ in L’Etang, Jacquie and Pieczka, Magda (eds) Public Relations: Critical Debates and Contemporary Practice. London: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp 23-40.
• Markham, Annette and Buchanan, Elizabeth (2012) Ethical Decision-Making and Internet Research: Recommendations from the AoIR Ethics Working Committee (Version 2.0).
• Staff, et al. (2016) ‘Using social media for social research: An introduction’ by GSR Social Science in Government’s social media research group May 2016.
• Townsend, Leanne and Wallace, Claire (2016) Social Media Research: A Guide to Ethics. ESRC Project at the University of Aberdeen.
• Weaver, Kay et al (2006) ‘From Propaganda to Discourse (and back again): Truth, Power, the Public Interest and Public Relations’ in L’Etang, Jacquie and Pieczka, Magda (eds) Public Relations: Critical Debates and Contemporary Practice. London: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp7-21.
• Wilbur, Douglas (2017) ‘Propaganda’s Place in Strategic Communication: The case Of ISIL’s Dabiq magazine’, International Journal of Strategic Communication, Vol. 11, pp.1-15.