The last few years have seen no shortage of examples of social media being used by governments to try and distort public opinion. Thankfully, however, examples of direct involvement in trying to quell dissent remain relatively rare, but a new study from Penn State reminds us that this isn’t the case throughout the world.
The researchers examined the use of Twitter during the 2014 protests in Venezuela, with social media frequently used by citizens to coordinate action and express their discontent. It was also used by the government however, and their tactics differed significantly, with their strategy clearly intended to try and suppress mass movements.
“When we started doing this study there had been a lot of optimism about the capacity of social media to produce revolutions throughout the world, like Arab Spring and the Color Revolutions in Europe,” the researchers say. “But it seems like, in hindsight, this was the result of short-term disequilibrium between the capacity of the masses to use this technology and the limited capacity of these elites to use it. A lot of these elites may have not been keeping up with modern communication technology and got caught unawares. So, for that short period of time, social media did produce better outcomes for revolutions and mass movements.”
Quelling dissent
The researchers examined the use of social media by both the Venezuelan government and the opposition parties after mass protests erupted following the election of Nicolas Maduro after the death of Hugo Chavez.
The analysis revealed a shift in Twitter usage by the government in response to the protests, with the topics of their tweets becoming noticeably diverse, with most doing their best to avoid any mention of the protests at all.
The researchers believe that this approach is largely due to the ease with which people become distracted online, hence why attempts to distract can prove effective.
“To have effective protests, you need to have a ton of people coordinated on a single message, so spreading other narratives disrupts that process of coordination,” the researchers say. “Being able to spread doubt is effective. You don’t have to get people to love your regime, you just need people to less convinced of the single narrative.”
Growing sophistication
This sophisticated approach also extended to the use of hashtags, with the regime using longer hashtags rather than shorter ones to try and promote distraction among the various protest groups. For instance, #RodillaEnTierraConNicolásMaduro was a popular hashtag used by the government, which translates as “knees on the ground with Nicolás Maduro.”
“That’s not a hashtag that individual protesters would come up with, and not just because it mentions the opposition leader, but because it is more of a focus-group tested way of specifically promoting a narrative,” the researchers explain. “The opposition was using short hashtags to coordinate different groups on a single message. But, we see the regime’s lengthy hashtags as an explicit attempt by them to generate a new topic of discussion.”
The researchers believe Venezuela provides an ideal environment for exploring the use of social media by governments, as Twitter adoption is among the highest in the world, and a large opposition party also exists to help researchers clearly identify two distinct groups, and their different strategies online.
