The readings of this week analyze the shift of political culture, identities and practices with the rise of digital technology. In “Trump from Reality TV to Twitter, or the Selfie-Determination of Nations”, Brian T. Edwards underlines how Trump adopted reality television and Twitter formats to create the appearance that he addresses his base directly, with a performance rhetorically and aesthetically far more appealing to contemporary audience/population that the one utilized by traditional politics. In that sense, Mark Poster coins the term “netizen” to think a new kind of political identity that shares allegiance to the nation with allegiance to the net as identical political and social practices. On the other hand, Paul Starr summarizes the concept “surveillance capitalism” as a technique implemented by governments and corporations to harvest personal data in digital media in order to produce behavioral modification.
These ideas can shed light to a way of influence public opinion that became the principal strategy of right wing governments in Argentina, namely, the use of microtargeting, trolls and viralization of fake news to impact voting behavior. In the case of Macri in Argentina, this technique consisted in the secret hiring of Cambridge Analytica to microtarget fake news to voters, and then to massively viralize hashtags about this fake news with trolls.
In the photo we can see the Trolls Center of the Pro government, whose existence started to be suspected when thousands of tweets of users with names uncommon in Argentina and with a “google translate” writing style shared the hashtags that supported Mauricio Macri.
Although after the voting it was revealed that most of the news that this trolls shared were fake, the immediate effect that they had was decisive to decide the presidential result. In that way, the troll became the most prominent figure in Argentine politics during the last years, shifting the traditional importance of social movements, as the impact of digital media and the incalculable effects of viralization far way exceeded the possible impact of popular corporeal manifestations.
