Puppet theater troupes would bring news to the inhabitants of villages and towns across Medieval Europe. The news they brought could easily have carried misinformation, political disinformation, and defamatory statements regarding well-known figures, from ministers to well-known musicians. Some troupes would no doubt have been welcomed warmly, and recompensed for their role in transmitting information. This will have incentivized some to spin stories – the more salacious, the better. And puppet theater troupes were the perfect vectors for spreading defamatory content fed to them by ill-intentioned inhabitants of towns and villages. Stopping the spread of this content would have been challenging.
Move forward a few centuries and add into the mix algorithms, advertising revenue, freedom of speech vs. Big Brother, AI-generated videos, the sheer volume and instantaneous spread of content, and the role of private companies in shaping public discourse. The landscape is much more complicated.
Some content is rapidly removed by social media platforms – including promotion of terrorist organizations, calls to violence, and graphic violence, amongst other things. However, this becomes trickier regarding online trolling: social media platforms typically need a lot of convincing that abusive material, that does not cross the line into criminality, should be removed.
US celebrities Faith Jenkins Lattimore and Kenny Lattimore recently sought to counter an avalanche of abusive and highly damaging disinformation spreading rapidly across a variety of social media platforms, and had their lawyers subpoena YouTube and Google to disclose the identities of video creators. While they could take legal action against some of the video creators, others were essentially beyond the reach of the couple, based as they were in Russia, India and Pakistan.
While some online abuse is “organic”, the fact that some of the video creators were based in disparate jurisdictions suggests some level of inorganic activity, i.e. a puppet master pulling strings, for some ulterior motive – anything ranging from personal animus, commercial rivalry, to increasing advertising revenue (or a combination thereof).
Of course, disinformation can then take on a life of its own, spread eagerly by social media users, with advertisers reaping the benefits. In the case of the Lattimores, their battle to halt the disinformation has not yet concluded, and the question that remains is whether social media platforms can/will do more to assist in taking abusive content down.
They certainly have the wherewithal, but have to balance this against arguments of freedom of speech, the risk of losing advertising revenue, and the risk of making their own platforms unattractive to users, if there is a perception that one’s activity is “censored”.
The puppet theater troupes that are constantly challenged/constrained, become a less appealing vector for disinformation.
The attention economy, the Lattimores found, is structured to reward the most eye-catching claims, allowing sensationalist but baseless narratives to spread and perpetually resurrect with little resistance from social media platforms.
