This is Not Propaganda

Ong noted that no one, at any level in this business, ever described their activity as ‘trolling’ or producing ‘fake news’. Everyone had their own ‘denial strategies’: the architects stressed it was merely a side hustle to their regular PR work and thus didn’t define them, and anyway they weren’t in charge of the whole political campaign; the community-level operators said someone else was leaving the really nasty, hateful comments. In any case this was the architecture of online influence, which would shift into a more aggressive gear when Duterte came to power.

‘The disinformation architect’, concludes Ong, ‘denies responsibility or commitment to the broader public by narrating a personal project of self-empowerment instead.’

If there is one thing I’ve been impressed with while browsing the shelves in the spiral-shaped library of my university, it is that one has to look beyond just ‘news’ and ‘politics’ and also consider poetry, schools, the language of bureaucracy and leisure to understand, as French philosopher Jacques Ellul put it, the ‘formation of men’s attitudes’.