#314 - Samuel Woolley on MANUFACTURING CONSENSUS

University of Texas at Austin faculty member Sam Woolley, whose expertise focuses on the use of propaganda in new media and emerging technologies, chats with Trey Elling about MANUFACTURING CONSENSUS: UNDERSTANDING PROPAGANDA IN THE AGE OF AUTOMATION AND ANONYMITY. Topics include:

• The book’s goal (1:12)
• How propaganda initially came to be (2:20)
• Jacques Ellul’s influence on Sam’s belief’s (6:05)
• Defining computational propaganda (8:55)
• Social media bots (12:43)
• ChatGPT (16:06)
• Governments loving Facebook & Reddit for computational propaganda (17:53)
• Propaganda-bred apathy (20:55)
• Democratizing propaganda being bad for democracy (22:39)
• Why social media is bad for civil discourse (24:41)
• What he’s taken from recent #TwitterFiles & congressional testimony revelations (28:04)
• Treating social media companies as public utilities (31:07)
• If its possible to quantify the number of social media bots (34:02)
• Encrypted messaging like WhatsApp as a propaganda tool (38:23)
• The danger of automated political influencers (41:56)
• How journalists have been crucial in Sam’s understanding of political bots (45:28)
• Journalists leaning on social media posts for articles (48:33)
• Journalists using bots for good (49:29)
• Bots writing news stories (51:24)
• ChatGPT usage at the college level (52:52)
• China using social media to spread propaganda abroad (57:29)
• Why Sam is still optimistic about the future (59:00)