Algorithmic Media Observatory

digital methods for internet policy and politics

Archives for September 2019

Memes after Trudeau’s Brownface Incident

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Highlights

Internet users were quick to ‘meme’ last week’s scandalous images of Trudeau dressed in ‘brownface’ and ‘blackface’. Memes differed by the political allegiance of those who shared them, illustrating how party supporters make memes to help their party’s public image.

Anti-Trudeau Conservative memes highlighted Trudeau’s hypocrisy, questioned his character, and characterized Liberal party accusations of racism as disingenuous.

Memes from the left focused on the broader social issue, choosing to address racism in Canada and the skin tone of its NDP leader Jagmeet Singh rather than targeting the specific images of Liberal candidate Justin Trudeau.

Pro-Trudeau Liberal memes sought to minimize the incident, focusing more on characterized Conservative leader Andrew Scheer as the real threat.

Analysis

The Algorithmic Media Observatory is tracking October 2019’s Federal Election in Canada specifically through memes, or images inspired by Internet culture.

Ugly and home-made but also incisive commentary and artful craft, memes offer a unique vantage point from which to observe public opinion and, crucially, how party supporters and engaged citizens use the internet to identify with parties, leaders and movements.

To date, we have identified roughly 30 Facebook groups posting memes about Canadian politics, some professional other seemingly user-generated. We have found that:

  1. There is a strong presence of anti-Trudeau and Conservative meme groups on Facebook. These groups are among the largest, most active in the sample.
  2. There are smaller, but equally active, meme communities for Liberal and NDP supporters that share memes daily. 
  3. Meme groups care about different issues (climate change in the left and center vs. political corruption on the right and center), but the Trudeau scandal mobilized all sides.

These three features are clearly exhibited in the top 20 Facebook groups by follower count.

Most groups post negative content about Liberal candidate Justin Trudeau. Anti-Trudeau groups have a much larger follower count (approximately 900,000 anti-Trudeau followers), although we hesitate to give much weight to follower counts given how easily these numbers can be artificially manipulated. In the past few days, some Liberal groups have remained committed to the party, but tried to distance themselves from Trudeau.

Consensus coded by Fenwick McKelvey and research team

Conservative and Anti-Trudeau Memes

Among more conservative circles, memes emphasized the hypocrisy of Justin Trudeau and his followers. Memes, such as Figure 1, use the scandal as a chance to discredit Liberals as hypocrites. In doing so, these memes re-frame a discussion about race in politics as an opportunity to discredit any accusations of racism in the campaign, especially from Liberal candidates and supporters. These memes suggest some blowback to the Liberal’s strategy of opposition research and negative campaigning  against the Conservative party. Anti-Trudeau memes, such as Figure 2, also connect Trudeau’s poor judgement in 2001 with tropes and opinions of his other moral shortcomings (like being too ‘gropy’ with women).

Figure 1
Figure 2

Left and NDP Memes

Unlike conservative groups, NDP supporters heavily mocked the prime minister’s actions as racist, as seen in Figures 3 and 4.

Figure 3
Figure 4

Emblematic of the NDP’s focus on social issues, the memes showed direct concern of racism, pushing themselves onto a socially moral high ground with their own leader, Jagmeet Singh. Memes questioned Liberal sentiment, presenting the defense of Trudeau as humorous and ridiculous as well as the calling out the ignorance of Liberals regarding structural racism in Canada.

Liberal, pro-Trudeau Memes

Pro-Trudeau, Liberal memes have attempted to do damage control by attacking conservatives. Their memes ignore the black/brownface actions and focus instead on discussing racism within Canadian politics in general. These memes identify the Conservative candidates, party and ideology as a worse version of Trudeau’s actions, implying that Trudeau is not being “as” racist as the Conservative party, as seen in Figure 5

We have also observed Liberal groups sharing a photo of Stephen Harper during an honorary Indigenous ceremony, removing the context of the image to fabricate their message. This strategy backfired, as Robert Jago explains:

Here’s a public service berating: Liberals, when you send this picture around and say – look Harper did it too – he’s not at a Halloween party, he’s at a Native ceremony. That paint, the headdress, you’re laughing at a Native ceremony. YOU are the racist asshole in this scenario – Robert Jago

Other Liberal memes also downplay the damage this will have to the Liberal party’s election fortunes, questioning whether the past transgression of Trudeau would lead to “minorities” to vote for Scheer as seen in Figure 6.

Figure 5
Figure 6

Through memes, we have a new vantage point to understand partisanship in Canada as well as the ways message control may operate on so-called ‘user-generated’ content.

As the black/brownface controversy and election generally progress, memes will continue to further dialogue and opinion on candidates and the election. Our analysis of this event offers an important snapshot of how different segments of Canada’s political spectrum interpret racist acts and highlights how politics and humour intersect.

New project: The Great Canadian Encyclopedia of Political Memes

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While Maclean’s magazine aspires to entertain its readers, it certainly didn’t expect its 7 November 2018 cover to be quite so entertaining. The cover labelled a photo of five Conservative leaders as “The Resistance” – a reference to anti-Trump movement south of the border. The comparison was too funny for Liberals and other partisans who could not rationalize comparing activism in the United States to the efforts of five politicians in Canada against the carbon tax. On social media, users mocked the cover by photoshopping it or recaptioning it as if to double-down on their perception that the cover was absurd. In effect, Maclean’s cover was made meme, becoming a moment of political frenzy, reminding citizens about politics and re-framing discussion of the carbon tax, for a moment. 

Memes are referential images shared, modified and, in the case above, politicized online. The Maclean’s Resistance cover suggests that memes are a way of expressing and engaging in partisan politics, in this case allowing Liberals and anti-Conservative voters to constitute what Zizi Papacharissi calls “networked structures of feeling”. 

Memes may be political, but we’re not sure how, at least in Canada. There was a rush after the election to overstate meme’s effect in Donald Trump’s election. But as Dr. Whitney Phillips, Dr. Gabriella Coleman and Dr. Jessica Beyer emphasize the popularity of memes about Trump and Trump himself “cannot and should not be tethered to online communities of the past. It was, instead, symptomatic of much deeper, much more immediate cultural malaise.” 

Our project then looks to memes as a reflection of this deeper story of Canadian culture, looking to the popularity of memes to understand how partisans and publics relate to politicians and parties. There is little research about memes in Canadian politics (the notable exception being the work of Mireille Lalancette). We believe that through memes partisans and political spectators form and sustain feelings and attachments to parties and leaders.

Memes also defy current approaches to political communication and election studies. We are just beginning to understand how the short, visual, often humorous messages alter the popularity of political issues and the nature of partisanship.

Our project provides a first major study of memes in elections in Canada, experimenting with large-scale computational methods in cooperation with established methods of political communication to understand the encoding of politics and partisanship through memes.

Over the next few weeks into the election, our project will be covering memes and visual internet culture in the Canadian election. Reports will:

  1. Help describe the most popular and most frequently shared memes during the Canadian federal election and analyze their political significance;
  2. Discuss how partisans differ in how they produce, modify and share memes in Canada; and,
  3. Map how memes circulate online.

We will need your help too.

At the end of the project, we will collect our analysis to create The Great Canadian Encyclopedia of Political Memes. Modeled after Know Your Meme, we will collect significant memes and tell their stories. After the election, we will be sharing how you too can participate in writing an entry.

The project is led by Dr. McKelvey (Concordia University) and Dr. Blackburn (Binghamton University) working with a team of students in the Communication Studies at Concordia University.

Daemons are the programs that run the internet. Here’s why it’s important to understand them.

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To be able to regulate the internet, we need to understand the programs that manage how it works and what it does. Shutterstock

Fenwick McKelvey, Concordia University

Daemons are real. Or at least computer daemons are.

A daemon is early computer slang. In the first computer labs, daemons meant the programs running in the background, doing the invisible work of keeping systems online. The word came from Maxwell’s demon, a 19th-century thought experiment that imagined a supernatural creature capable of bringing order to the world; this inspired generations of scientists to try to make daemons real.

‘Internet Daemons: Digital communications possessed’ received the Canadian Communication Association’s 2019 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize. University of Minnesota Press

My open-access book, Internet Daemons: Digital communications possessed, explores the daemons that keep the Internet connected. But daemons — and other computer programs — do much more than transmit information. Here, I want to connect my intensive focus on internet daemons to extensive ways that computing orders and optimizes life today.

Daemons are integral to understanding contemporary concerns over smart city projects like Google’s Sidewalk Labs in Toronto and recent attention to surveillance capitalism. To address these recent matters of algorithmic regulation, we need to understand the long history of internet daemons and their ensuing policy problems.

Daemonic intelligence

The internet has its roots in the Cold War. Researchers at the United States Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) embedded computers into the design of an experimental digital communication system. Known as ARPANET, its design developed into today’s internet. And these computers, known as Interface Message Processors (IMPs), became the switches, routers and gateways that make up the internet’s infrastructure today.

By embedding computers in its infrastructure, ARPANET mandated daemons to better manage our communications. Daemons were a collective intelligence distributed across the ARPANET and in constant contact with each other and early users. Their collective intelligence optimized the flows of information on the ARPANET.

ARPANET established that daemons could indeed better manage communications and that an optimal network would be solved through their coordination. As ARPANET turned into our home internet, these theoretical challenges became public ones, left for internet service providers to solve.

‘Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing’ is a 1972 documentary about ARPANET.

The old questions about the optimal way for daemons to manage our communications turned into major debates about net neutrality and the ability of service providers to manage communication. Service providers can choose to promote business partnerships, like streaming services and demote peer-to-peer networking, like BitTorrent.

5G, the term for next-generation wireless service, will raise these issues all over again. 5G requires even more daemonic intelligence to manage the complexity of sending its radio signals and allows service providers to prioritize signals so some applications preform better than others. This is a problem, because public policy makers hardly understand the work of daemons today and will certainly lack proper oversight of the next-generation daemons necessary for 5G.

The problem of optimization, however, is not just a telecommunications issue.

Governance through optimization

Internet daemons optimize how computers actively manage systems toward certain goals or highest-efficency states. Optimization is another way to understand algorithmic governance. It is at once a way of thinking and a way of doing. To optimize is to calculate optimal states that solve social and political problems. Optimization also involves ways to actualize these states. Daemons are just one kind of optimization that has developed in the history of computing.

The technical connotations of optimization obscures its social and political implications. For example, an optimal amount of news to include in Facebook’s NewsFeed or shorter passenger wait times on Uber are technical decisions and business ones.

By understanding the particular work of daemons, we can begin to discern how pervasive optimization is today. Shutterstock

The coming pandaemonium

Daemonic optimization became a template for digital platforms. Today, daemons (and other programs like them) are everywhere. Embedded in our screens, apps and smartphones, their nudges, rankings and interventions influence our behaviours and our social activities.

Optimization has moved beyond networked communications and is being applied to approach social problems. Google admitted as much in a 2016 internal thought experiment called Selfish Ledger that speculated how global problems — like health or climate change — could be solved by phones and other networked devices tuned to monitor and optimize human activity.

Google functions as what I imagine as a global operating system, a distributed intelligence able to steer individuals toward its goals through nudges and other cues in our phones and other devices. It depend on daemons to link, standardize, mediate, secure and manage the flows of information.

Now, we are caught between competing operating systems run by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Tencent and, to a lesser degree, Facebook. The power of optimization is too much to be left in the hands of a few companies.

In user design, dark patterns refer to interfaces that trick people into making bad decisions. We see dark patterns everyday: for example, when we click a pop-up ad accidentally because it looked like a window on our computer or we are unable to uninstall an app because the “close window” button is hidden. These same technologies could optimize for addiction, anxiety or confusion.

Optimizing is politics by other means

The paradox is that improvements in technologies of control do not imply better control of technology. Instead, these operating systems seem out of the control to everyday people who themselves feel increasingly under control.

Read more: It’s time for a new way to regulate social media platforms

Daemons illuminate the power of technological control today. Facing our daemons might be the first step in bringing optimizations under democratic control through better public oversight of daemons and regulatory institutions capable of deciding what’s optimal and holding these systems accountable.

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Fenwick McKelvey, Associate Professor in Information and Communication Technology Policy, Concordia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Review of Communication: Themed Issue Call for Papers

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Optimization: Towards a Critical Concept

Guest Editors: Fenwick McKelvey and Joshua Neves

Optimization has emerged as a quiet “buzzword.” It is seemingly everywhere and yet elusive. Our bodies, tools, and institutions are now understood as resilient and perpetually updatable. New diets and fitness apps promise to optimize our caloric intake just as an optimal information diet promises to make many informed citizens. So informed that what to watch next or who to vote for becomes one of many effortless choices made possible by the recommendations of algorithms, smartphones, and other optimizing systems. But what does optimization mean anyway? Or more crucially, what does it do? Who or what is optimized? What relationships or platforms are generated? And who or what or where falls away—is dis-optimized?

Optimization intervenes in the growing formulation of algorithmic governance, regulation or algocracy, drawing on theories of communication and control. Optimization refers to specific technical architectures (e.g., centralized, decentralized or distributed) as well as applications of mathematical theory to social life—including Pareto optimalities, linear programming and stochastic theory. Taken together, optimization provides a way to understand the iterative projects of algorithmic governance as iterations of operations research, systems-cybernetic theory, or computational management.

But optimization is also deeply cultural and situated—even if its claims are often general or biopolitical. As such, its technical logics and architectures should be considered alongside real social practices, geopolitical networks, and the forms of organization (and violence) shored up by the desire for optimum performance.

This themed issue calls for the interdisciplinary scrutiny of optimization as a critical concept and a form of management crucial to the rhythm of networks. We invite historical and theoretical interventions around optimization and seek a wide range of approaches and analyses of the sociotechnical assemblages made possible by autonomous software and ubiquitous hardware. The goal is to provide a clear, multi-faceted introduction; help situate contemporary concerns around platforms and social engineering within the development of management, cybernetics, social and political theory; and turn attention to global specificities beyond North Atlantic examples, as well as the many forms of difference elided by optimization itself.

How do these systems intervene in economic, social, and political life? And how do they transform or diminish the political imagination—now tied to industrial research and development and the calculations of a control society?

Some topics this issue hopes to consider include, but are not limited to:

  • Considerations of how optimization systems intervene in economic, social, and political life. How do they transform or diminish the political imagination—now tied to industrial research and development and the calculations of a control society?
  • Case studies of optimization of the human/body (e.g., health, self-harm, mindfulness, biohacking) or systemic optimization (e.g., smart cities, ecosystems, platforms, networks)
  • Genealogies of optimization techniques with particular attention to operations research, Pareto optimalities, linear programming, game theory, chaos theory, and multi-agent emergent systems
  • Metaphors and practices of optimization in popular or political cultures (e.g., self-tracking, speculative fiction, acceleration, activism)
  • Optimization from or in relation to the margins (e.g., questions of scale, geopolitics, and frameworks beyond the biopolitical or cybernetic) or attention to problems of difference (e.g., race, ethnicity, indigeneity, religion, disability, sexuality, gender)
  • Regulatory consequences of myths or discourses of optimization in social, media, or technology policy
  • Speculations around the possibility of dark optimizations or radical futures through optimization (e.g., fully automated luxury communism, post scarcity, posthuman, post-Earth, dis-optimization)

Submission Deadline and Guidelines

December 1, 2019 Submit a 500-word abstract for Guest Editors’ review
Spring 2020 Submit full manuscript for Guest Editors’ review
July 1, 2020 Submit full manuscript for peer review

Manuscripts must be submitted electronically through the ScholarOne Manuscripts site for Review of Communication: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rroc

Manuscripts should be prepared in Microsoft Word using a 12-point common font, double-spaced, and between 6,000 to 8,000 words (including endnotes).

Please refer to and follow the journal’s manuscript preparations instruction for authors.

Authors should identify which themed call their paper is responding to by selecting the relevant drop-down option in ScholarOne. 

Review Process
In keeping with the journal’s current practice, submissions will undergo rigorous peer review, including screening by the guest editors and review by at least two anonymous referees.

Please direct inquiries about the Optimization: Towards a Critical Concept themed issue to:

Fenwick McKelvey, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Communication Studies
Concordia University
fenwick.mckelvey[at]concordia.ca

Joshua Neves, PhD
Assistant Professor
Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema
Concordia University
joshua.neves[at]concordia.ca