Introduction

People worldwide are very concerned about false information, especially across social media platforms, as perpetuated by domestic politicians (see Chap. 1). To better understand the mechanics of how such false information challenges the health of the civic body, this chapter explores the economics of emotion (the optimisation of datafied emotional content for financial gain) and the politics of emotion (the optimisation of datafied emotional content for political gain) under different affective contexts worldwide. We start by examining elections in the USA, given its increasingly politically affectively polarised population and long experience of emotive electoral disinformation on social media. We next turn to the Philippines, given its affective patronage democracy, clientelism and extremely high social media usage. We follow this with Sweden, a country that should be resilient to false information given its strong civic institutions, but that has witnessed a breakdown of consensus culture initiated by the emergence of right-wing populist nationalist political parties and supporting online media. These examples provide a grounded sense of the scale and dynamics of false information media systems. They highlight the importance of understanding specificities of affective contexts, and their intersections with international information flows such as information warfare, ideological struggles and resources for content moderation by global platforms.

USA: Affectively Polarised Elections

American scholars pioneered the concept of political party identification, defining it as an intense psychological attachment to a political group (Campbell et al., 1960). A study of US partisans across five decades (1960–2010) confirms that partisan identities are primarily affective attachments (Iyengar et al., 2012). Studies also show that the USA is highly politically polarised and that this long predates the social media industry (Barrett et al., 2021). This is true whether one considers affective polarisation (namely, an emotional attachment to in-group partisans and hostility towards out-group partisans (Iyengar & Westwood, 2015)) or ideological polarisation (namely, the degree to which people disagree about political issues (Arguedas et al., 2022)). While there is little comparative work across countries on these forms of polarisation, several studies show that both forms of polarisation increased in the USA across the past four decades, rising more than in other countries (Boxell et al., 2020; Heltzel & Laurin, 2020; Draca & Schwarz, 2021). Explanations for the origins of such polarisation include rising income inequality, elite polarisation, demographic changes and strong political/cultural initiatives in the Democratic Party since President Barack Obama, such as tighter gun control and same-sex marriage (Böttcher & Gersbach, 2020). Explanations also include media influence. For instance, the five-decade study of US partisans (1960–2010) finds that affective polarisation is reinforced following exposure to prolonged media-based presidential negative campaigns (Iyengar et al., 2012). Also relevant is that surveys on news polarisation in the USA from 2016 and 2022 show that the USA is highly polarised compared to most other countries and has no large centrist media outlet (Fletcher, 2022).

It is in this highly polarised country, with very high Internet penetration (90% in 2022) and online news consumption (in 2022, 67% accessed news online, of which 42% were via social media (Jenkins & Graves, 2022)), that the social media and search engine platforms incubating global false information online are located. The USA relies heavily on self-regulation of its media industries. Neither the US Federal Communications Commission nor other federal regulators present formal rules on content that Internet platforms can carry. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 protects Internet platforms from the threat of private liability for content they host. This protection was an effort to promote rapid growth of Internet platforms and placed the burden of content curation on the platforms themselves (Fukuyama & Grotto, 2020, p. 209). This lack of regulation allowed platforms to design their products in ways that further their business interests: namely, achieving massive scale and advertising income by maximising audience engagement (becoming emotional by design). The bigger the platform, the greater the network externalities that make it indispensable to users (so-called network effects) and the greater the capacity to extract data from users that enable the platforms to develop AI systems and target advertising more efficiently (McNamee, 2019; Starr, 2020). Furthermore, because their products are free to users, this protected platforms like Facebook and Google from anti-trust regulation in the USA (McNamee, 2019).

Given this lack of regulation and high polarisation, it is unsurprising that use of social media to spread emotive disinformation to manipulate elections has long been evident in the USA. In 2006, evidencing the politics of emotion, political blogs tried to influence American elections by gaming search engines to push web pages carrying negative content to the top of relevant search results. Using link bombing techniques (‘Googlebombing’), website masters and bloggers use the anchor text to associate an obscure, negative term with a public entity. In 2010, a study of Twitter in the Massachusetts Senate race found a ‘Twitter-bomb’, namely, an organised effort to spread false information about the Democratic candidate through anonymous Twitter accounts targeting users interested in the topic (Metaxas & Mustafaraj, 2010; Mustafaraj & Metaxas, 2017). In the 2016 presidential campaign, pro-Donald Trump tweets were more likely to go viral than those in support of his rival, Hillary Clinton, as Trump’s gut-feeling tweets were more authentic (Enli, 2017) and because they were amplified by far-right pro-Trump outlets such as Fox News (Benkler et al., 2017; Faris et al. 2017, August 16). ‘The donald’ subreddit was monitored by the Trump campaign, passing the most powerful content onto the campaign’s social media team (Moore, 2018, p. 29). Such amplification was enabled by the affordances of social media platforms that enabled those passionate about politics to organise. For instance, in 2015, Twitter introduced a group direct message function which led to some group direct messages turning into pro-Trump, invite-only ‘rooms’ accommodating 50 people, like ‘Patriots United’. Many rooms had accompanying hashtags to track members’ tweets as they propagated (Musgrave, 2017, August 9). Trump’s election team also took advantage of Facebook’s bespoke guidance on how to run campaigns successfully on Facebook, whereas Clinton’s team did not (Levy, 2020, p. 350). Beyond social media amplification, such emotive messaging is also amplified through the USA’s highly polarised mainstream media, with the right-wing media ecosystem less reliant than the left-wing on professionally sourced facts or fact-checking (Faris et al., 2017, August 16; Benkler et al., 2017).

The economics of emotion is also in play. Facebook’s ad auctions reward advertisers who target people who most want to see the ad, for instance, costing the advertiser less to advertise to such audiences (Levy, 2020, p. 350); and in 2016, Trump won Facebook ad auctions due to the likely engagement his content generates among target audiences compared with Clinton, taking shape in racism, misogyny and antagonism (Jutel, 2021). Similarly, Mustafaraj and Metaxas (2017) demonstrate that infiltration was successfully used on Facebook to spread fake news during the 2016 US presidential election, for financial benefit through online advertising. A year later, Silverman et al. (2017, August 8) documented the growing universe of US-focused, hyperpartisan websites and Facebook pages, many run from outside the USA, motivated by profit-seekers (also see Forest, 2022).

Such media ecologies are exploitable by foreign actors seeking to wage information warfare, for instance, by encouraging dissent via targeted attacks that play on existing societal and cultural fissures. During the 2016 presidential election, the foreign military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU) fuelled disinformation, seeking to influence the very bonds of society (Bolton, 2021). Tactics included hacking-and-dumping campaigns, fake online personas on social media and disseminating propaganda (Howard et al., 2018; Jamieson, 2018; McFaul & Kass, 2019). In terms of hacking-and-dumping campaigns, Russian cyber agents stole data from both the Republican and Democratic parties, then releasing only data stolen from the Democrats through fictitious online personae (DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0) and through websites including WikiLeaks. This represented the first time that a foreign government had tried to steal data from American politicians and then publish it to influence an election. In terms of fake online personae, such content was created by Russian company, the Internet Research Agency, linked to the Kremlin (McFaul & Kass, 2019; Rid, 2021). In a 2015 exposé, The New York Times estimates that the Internet Research Agency’s then approximately 400 employees created production-line content for every popular social network: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LiveJournal (popular in Russia), VKontakte (Russia’s version of Facebook) and comment sections of Russian news outlets (Chen, 2015, June 2). In September 2017, Facebook revealed that it had closed 470 fake Internet Research Agency-controlled accounts and pages that had bought $100,000 in advertising (over 3000 ads) pushing divisive issues (such as race, gay rights, police shootings and immigration) between 2015 and 2017, reaching at least 29 million Americans (Hatmaker, 2017, November 1; Shane 2017). Twitter disclosed that 3814 accounts were operated by the Internet Research Agency, reaching about 1.4 million people (McFaul & Kass, 2019). Big data analysis of the Internet Research Agency’s Twitter activity in the US presidential election identifies five handle categories: ‘Right Troll’ (propagating nativist and right-leaning populist messages); ‘Left Troll’ (propagating socially liberal messages, focusing on cultural identity); ‘News Feed’ (presenting themselves as US local news aggregators); ‘Hashtag Gamer’ (where users add a hashtag to a tweet and then answer the implied question, such as ‘#WasteAMillionIn3Words Donate to #Hillary’) and ‘Fearmonger’ (spreading disinformation about fabricated crisis events) (Linvill & Warren, 2020). Russia’s Internet Research Agency activities were designed to interfere in elections by campaigning for African American voters to boycott elections or follow the wrong voting procedures; encouraging extreme right-wing voters to be more confrontational; and spreading sensationalist, conspiratorial, false political news to voters (Howard et al., 2018; Padda, 2020). Of course, in the context of overall spending on digital advertising in the 2016 election cycle ($1.4 billion), and overall bot and spam activity online, the amounts identified as Russian interference are tiny, and hence their impact may also be irrelevant (Boyd-Barrett, 2020). It does, however, highlight how the politics of emotion are marshalled in information warfare efforts.

In the USA, then, a country characterised by high political and news media polarisation, fake news stories and ‘dark ads’ (online ads only seen by the recipient) are readily fuelled by partisans, partisan outlets, mainstream press, social media, and domestic and foreign political actors. As Heltzel and Laurin (2020) observe, although fewer than 10% of Americans identify as extremely liberal or conservative, this very polarised minority pervades political discourse. News stories cover their views more often, and because both liberal and conservative extremists use negative, angry language to condemn opponents that make them feel threatened (Frimer et al., 2018), their messages on polarising issues containing moral-emotional words are more likely to spread through social networks (Brady et al. 2017; also see Mac & Silverman, 2021, February 21). Perhaps influenced by this extreme and amplified political polarisation, the USA ranks lowest in media trust (at 26%) among news consumers surveyed across 46 countries in 2022, with only 14% of those on the right-wing trusting most news most of the time (the figure is 39% on the left-wing) (Newman et al., 2022). We turn now to the Philippines, where social media usage is even more pervasive than in the USA and where the affective nature of politics takes form in affective clientelism.

The Philippines: Affective Clientelism

The Philippines is a weak democracy, experiencing centuries’ old socio-economic inequalities and a large gap between rich elites and poor masses. Emerging from a system of patron-client relations established during the Spanish colonial period (1521–1898), it has been described as a patronage democracy where parties and candidates mainly rely on contingent distribution of material benefits, or patronage, to mobilise voters. While liberal-democratic in name since the 1986 People Power Revolution removed dictator Ferdinand Marcos (whose dictatorship spanned 1972–1986), politics in the Philippines is clientelistic in practice, with the patron and strongman leadership linking political elites to the electorate. Political parties are candidate-centred coalitions of provincial bosses, political machines and local clans, anchored on clientelistic, parochial, personal inducements rather than on issues, ideologies or party platforms. Through patronage, presidents build alliances among political elites, including legislators and other state agencies, local politicians, warlords and clans (Teehankee & Calimbahin, 2020). Collective clientelism is the norm: it involves strong affective components, providing certain types of ‘public goods’ to specific groups in exchange for votes from group members. The loyalty bought by collective clientelism operates alongside coercion, including private and public use of violence at all levels of the politico-economic elite. There is a high level of legitimacy for leadership that credibly fills promises of both ‘good’ patronage and strongmanship (Kreuzer, 2020).

While there is a tradition of freedom of speech, traditional media outlets are owned by oligarchic families and new wealth, and the Philippines ranks high in terms of violence against media practitioners (Chua, 2022; Teehankee & Calimbahin, 2020). In 2016, a press freedom index compiled by Reporters without Borders (an international non-profit, non-governmental organisation whose stated aim is safeguarding the right to freedom of information) ranked the Philippines poorly (138 out of 180 countries), and it has since maintained a similar figure (Reporters without Borders, 2020). With high internet penetration (82% in 2022) (Newman et al., 2022), the reach of television to access news in the Philippines is declining (from 66% in 2020 to 60% in 2022), with a shift to social media (73% use it to access news in 2022) and online sites of traditional media (Chua, 2022). Almost half of the Philippines’ 103 million citizens are highly active social media users; in 2020, Filipinos spent over 9 hours daily online, the highest usage in the world, well above the global average of 6 hours 43 minutes (Llamas, 2020). Access to Facebook is provided free with all smartphones (via Facebook’s Free Basics), but Filipinos incur data charges when visiting other websites, including newspapers. Consequently, millions of citizens rely on social media for news, consuming partisan opinion masquerading as fact. In 2020, only 27% of Filipinos say that they trust news media overall, this figure rising to 37% in 2022 (Chua, 2022; Newman et al., 2020). This political and media milieu, with its strong affective components, provides fertile ground for false information, especially during elections.

The 2016 presidential elections in the Philippines (won by Rodrigo Duterte on a populist platform with record voter turnout) marked an increase in use of social media platforms, with curated content managed by professionals who amplified their message in an unregulated, cost-effective manner (Teehankee & Calimbahin, 2020). Unsurprisingly, the politics of emotion is evident in an ethnographic study across 2016–2017 that finds ‘the architects of networked disinformation’ to be a common part of Filipino political campaigns at national and local levels. Campaign strategists from boutique advertising and public relations agencies mobilise populist sentiment across the political spectrum, relying on the promotional labour of digital influencers on social media, and fake account operators who manually operate fake profiles to infiltrate community groups and news pages to generate ‘volatile virality’ (Ong & Cabañes, 2018, p. 8). This involves opening up spaces for discontent to hijack sentiments and sow public division; silencing political dissent; cyberbullying and ‘slutshaming’ influencers (especially women); using ‘signal scrambling’ (to dampen virality of opposing campaigns’ hashtag by using similar but syntactically different decoy hashtags and seeding these to split the original hashtag’s community); and engaging in historical revisionism (retelling sordid political histories as fairy tales of a golden age) (Ong & Cabañes, 2018). The politics of emotion is also evident in a study conducted by Demos (a British cross-party, independent think tank) and US-based National Democratic Institute (a non-partisan, non-governmental organisation that aims to increase the effectiveness of democratic institutions in developing countries). Its focus on gendered disinformation on Twitter in the Philippines finds that stories told to discredit and discourage female participation in public life seek to engender anger, disgust and disdain in the third-party reader, and fear and shame in the second person target (Judson et al., 2020, October).

Well before Duterte’s election, numerous fake news sites and partisan blogs supported him, with fake endorsements from celebrities and leaders like Pope Francis (such as ‘chosen by God’) (Syjuco, 2017, October 23). Notably, in January 2016, Facebook sent three employees to train the various presidential candidates and their staffs on how best to use Facebook. One month before the election, Duterte occupied 64% of all election-related conversations on Facebook pages in the Philippines, despite being vastly outspent by rivals (Vaidhyanathan, 2018, p. 193). Duterte’s popularity levels increased as president, even as his administration eroded the separation of powers and rule by law to silence critical media and government opponents. His core, populist message was one of discipline, order and submission to the top strongman’s commands (Kreuzer, 2020), including pronouncements in a violent war on drugs, unity of long-established power blocs through patronage and charges of fake news towards his critics (Ragragio, 2020).

In 2021, an investigative story in Rappler highlighted the role played in spreading false information by the economics of emotion. Its investigation of digital marketing group, Twinmark Media Enterprises, shows that several Filipino celebrities and influencers were paid hundreds of thousands to millions of pesos across 2017 and 2018 to unknowingly or indirectly amplify false information and government propaganda, before Facebook banned the agency in January 2019 for coordinated inauthentic behaviour. The strategy involved Twinmark paying influencers and popular meme and celebrity fan pages to share content from Twinmark-owned websites to increase engagement. The agency also has its own pages. Facebook users that follow the influencers or popular pages see the posts and are led to Twinmark websites, where they are served money-generating ads, false information or propaganda (Elemia & Gonzales, 2021, February 27). It is only when such behaviour affects Facebook’s perceived priorities that action is taken. When ex-Facebook data scientist, Sophie Zhang, uncovered a network of fake accounts creating low-quality, scripted fake engagement for politicians in the Philippines in October 2019, Facebook left it to languish. But when a tiny subset of that network began creating an insignificant amount of fake engagement on Trump’s page in February 2020, Facebook moved quickly to remove it (Wong, 2021, April 12).

While affective clientelism and extremely high social media usage are features of the Philippines, the predominance of social media, the neglect by globally dominant social media platforms (in terms of content moderation) and the weakness of mainstream news are common themes in many parts of the world suffering from false information online. However, even countries with strong, independent media institutions are not immune, as the following example from Sweden shows.

Sweden: Alt-Right Erosion of Consensus Culture

Sweden is a strong democratic state. Its secular, liberal society is based on knowledge, education, a strong welfare state, national unity and a deep, consensus-driven political culture (Andersson, 2009). It regularly tops all global rankings for good places to live with a reputation for gender equality, environmental concern, technological prowess and democratic design (Rapacioli, 2018). Reporters without Borders’ (2021) press freedom index ranks Sweden as the third most independent and free press in the world out of 180 countries (it has been in the top ten since ranking began in 2013). It has strong press freedoms, with law enforcement actively combatting attacks against journalists. Its public service media is funded through taxation, and the government subsidises local news. Swedes’ trust in news media is comparable to the global average: in 2020, four in ten Swedes express a general trust in the news, and 50% did so in 2021 and 2022, with trust much higher for news sources regularly used. However, with very high Internet penetration (96% in 2022), there are very low levels of trust for news found in social media (Newman et al., 2020, 2022; Westlund, 2021, 2022). Furthermore, according to Microsoft’s (2021) Digital Civility Index, Sweden is quite uncivil online. It ranked only as 15th most civil out of 22 countries surveyed in 2021. As such, Sweden has both strengths and fissures in its resilience to emotive, false information online.

Furthermore, Sweden’s consensus culture has been damaged by the emergence of far-right populist nationalist Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna [SD]). Founded in 1988, it crossed a threshold to become elected to parliament in 2010 and now forms the country’s third largest parliamentary party. Alongside Sweden’s smaller, far-right parties, Sweden Democrats often nostalgically position the 1940s and 1950s as a ‘golden age’ of ‘Swedish democracy, socio-economic wellbeing and ethnic homogeneity and cohesion’ while accusing political opponents of eroding these phenomena through liberal immigration policies among other things (Merrill, 2020). Sweden Democrats drastically altered Sweden’s dynamics of affective polarisation: by 2014–2015, extremely negative sentiment towards Sweden Democrats was found from Members of Parliament and voters from all other parties (Reiljan & Ryan, 2018). This erosion of consensus is reflected in the growth of Sweden’s alternative right-wing media that has taken root despite Sweden’s tradition of strong, independent media institutions (Reporters without Borders, 2020).

The rise of extreme right-wing politics, political populism and White supremacy movements has been accompanied by the growth of online alternative media with a far-right political agenda, fuelled by the politics of emotion. A cross-national analysis of right-wing alternative media use in Germany, Austria and Finland (countries with similar mainstream media systems, where right-wing populist parties have had electoral success) finds a comparatively high prevalence of right-wing alternative online media in Sweden. With regard to audience characteristics, the strongest predictors of ‘alt-right’ media use are political interest, a critical stance towards immigration, a sceptical assessment of news quality and distrust in public service broadcasting. Use of social media as a primary news source also increases likelihood of alt-right news consumption (Schulze, 2020). Highlighting the economics of emotion, there are also fake news websites with names almost identical to trusted local news websites (such as http://www.thelocal.com) circulating 100% fabricated stories (Rapacioli, 2018).

Sweden’s consensus culture has been a constant point of reference and model for the European Left. However, the European and American liberal Right view Sweden as a dystopian, cradle-to-grave society that strangles individual freedom (Andersson, 2009). As such, Sweden’s own network of right-wing alternative news sites regularly feed right-wing partisan outlets abroad (Rapacioli, 2018, p. 56). A study of far-right English-language media circulated mainly within transatlantic networks finds what Titley (2019) calls ‘Taboo News’ about Sweden. Structured by its antagonistic positioning in relation to the ‘mainstream’, it validates itself as covering news which will not be reported, or which is being actively suppressed, by a ‘politically correct’ public culture of ‘fake news’. Such international right-wing partisan outlets use racialising and Islamophobic discourses about Muslim immigrants to portray Sweden as a dystopian future to be averted: a failed social experiment in immigration and multiculturalism.

Conclusion

This chapter has exposed specific ways in which the economics of emotion and politics of emotion incubate false information in different affective contexts to harm the global civic body. Our three country-specific examples highlight the importance of understanding specificities of cultures of emotion, as well as their intersections with international phenomena of information warfare (in the case of the USA), global platform neglect (in the case of the Philippines) and ideological struggles (in the case of Sweden).

In the highly politically polarised USA, use of social media to spread emotive disinformation to manipulate elections has been apparent since 2006 and shows no signs of abating. Studies have uncovered disinformation techniques on dominant digital platforms; the importance of political supporters in social media amplification; and foreign and domestic actors promoting fake news and propaganda on social media to further polarise the USA, to spread conspiracies and for economic gain. As platforms constantly tweak their algorithms and alter their affordances, these are exploitable by those seeking to spread viral messages hidden from mainstream view. Notably, platforms have so far avoided content regulation in the USA, allowing them to design their products to maximise audience engagement while failing to protect quality of information flows. That these platforms are emotional by design as well as central to everyday life makes it hard for governments worldwide to enact legislation to curb platform power.

Consequently, in the Philippines, a ‘patronage democracy’ where strongman politicians provide public goods in return for votes, false information flourishes. Disinformation techniques rely on professional campaign strategists to orchestrate and pay digital influencers, and fake account operators to manually operate fake profiles to infiltrate community groups and news pages to generate ‘volatile virality’. As in the USA, they open up spaces for discontent to hijack people’s sentiments, exacerbate existing divisions and silence political dissent. Such false information takes root because millions of Filipinos rely on social media for news, but are neglected by dominant, US-based social media platforms in terms of providing resources for content moderation. Even Sweden, a country with a tradition of consensus culture, strong, independent media institutions, and broad trust in mainstream news, is not immune to false information online. The rise of extreme right-wing politics since the late 1980s and political populism has led to an active alt-right media particularly concerned about immigration, providing fodder for transatlantic far-right media.

It is clear, then, that false information online manifests in varied affective contexts worldwide, driven by the economics of emotion and politics of emotion conducted across digital platforms. Recognising that this media ecology is highly complex with multiple stakeholders, in Part II we will focus on how the civic body can be strengthened to protect against affect-driven false information delivered via profiled targeting. It is to these core characteristics of false information, affect/emotions/mood and profiling/targeting that we now turn.