my name is gabi hello everyone up first will be victoria o'meara who is a phd candidate in the faculty of information and media studies at western university her research in her research she seeks to clarify and critique the unique labor dynamics that characterize the relationship between social media platforms and social media influencers so i do apologize for my reliance on notes to begin but i mean my thinking is a little bit all over the place on this at this point so  it's sort of an effort to think through some of the disruptive or maybe deviant practices that instagram influencers have kind of begun to engage in in the past few years and it's a type of what i'm calling kind of algorithmic subterfuge it's designed to exploit the logics of instagrams platform infrastructure and so today i want to essentially sort of raise two points the first is to kind of think through this comment pod as a unique and contemporary instance of sort of labor organizing that responds to a change in the conditions of influencers work and so i want to first kind of make the case that preference driven algorithms that curate our social media news feeds are not just about creating these sort of seductive environments for  users or consumers but they also function as a sort of disciplinary apparatus and a mechanism of labor control for the influencers to operate on those platforms so by way of doing that i'm going to then shift gears into talking about comment pots and as a form of sort of tech directed labor organizing and as i got to go through this if anybody sort of feels or sees a parallel between this and some sort of historic instance of labor organizing tweet me talk to me i would love to hear about it that would be great okay so the second thing i want to do is try and think through on kind of a broader scale the implications of these practices of comment pods for discussions about algorithmic the data drop doubles or the digital self and the inevitable limits of our efforts to metruff ai to capture and quantify and valorize human expression and sociality you know at a time when we're sort of grappling with the meaning and the ramifications of and important to add to those conversations there's a lot of the time when we talk about you know a data trail or your digital footprint i think some of that discourse encourages a view of the online themself is something that we emit or excrete as a byproduct of sort of our online lives to be scooped up by corporations but that framing also sort of obscures the way that that trail is something that people more and more create actively they produce with knowledge of platform algorithms and of how they work so in that way what is produced is never perfect nor complete representation of who we are and i think that space of ambiguity is an interesting kind of site of analysis and potential for creativity and okay a little bit of background just some boring stuff instagram is an image based social networking site it's currently boasting about eight hundred million users it is as i'm sure everybody knows owned by facebook it's proven to be a particularly attractive host for advertisers according to media kicks you'll see here it's worth about one six billion dollars as of this year so given its commercial saturation it might not be the first place we think to look about web practices that go against the grain but influencers have been engaged in with the struggle with the platform's algorithm  that i hope to show has some analytical purchase for thinking about labor capital relations in platform work and for challenging us to rethink what resistance can possibly look like online quickly what is influencer an influencer is an independent content creator they are sort of working at the margins of the cultural industries through their own social media activity they amass a large or particularly valuable online following and they earn an income by partnering with commercial brands and creating branded content that they promote to their own audiences through their instagram accounts so in the literature thus far you know there's been a tendency to look at this through the lens of legacy industries of modeling acting writing and many of the critiques have sort of focused on the practices of reputation seeking of self presentation strategies that influencers tend to engage in what i'm trying to forefront today is the centrality of that platform so when so the platform is really vitally important to an influencers work it acts as a type of algorithmic manager or so i'm going to argue it organizes the work it measures their performance and ultimately it determines you know the negotiating power that they have when they're in discussions with brands about contracts so in two thousand and sixteen the platform changed as again i'm sure many of you know instagram rolled out this curated newsfeed to replace the reverse chronological display so before the change instagram visually present presented these posts in reverse chronological order the most recent posts appear at the top and the older ones get pushed further and further down as more people you know post new conte usage history so the change itself isn't necessarily surprising instagram is owned by facebook and facebook operates a similar one you know and these preference driven algorithms are sort of designed to be sticky to keep people on the platform scrolling liking and sharing etc but the content creation or content curation algorithms have been critiqued as self affirming echo chambers that paper over sort of the unanticipated with a predictable and the agreeable but i'm suggesting here that instagrams change in presentation strategy is just as much motivated by organizing the productivity of its creators as much as it is about creating a sticky environment for its consumers to the change these strategies for maximizing visibility and engagement was about knowing the interests and the habits of your user base you know what times are they looking and what sort of things are they interested in success was always fickle but this labor process is relatively unambiguous influencers understand the sort of techno social mechanisms that organize it and they created posting strategies correspond but the curated news feed has been sort of a game changer in this regard it means that an influencers posts are no longer necessarily visible to all of their followers many content creators have reported drastic decreases in their reach and engagement metrics with some reports that posts on average reach about ten percent of their total audiences and so this obviously jeopardizes their sort of earning potential with advertisers furthermore the precise equations and logics that govern the relationship between metrics is proprietary and it's inwards if you look to your own self and you work on your content that you'll find the new mechanisms reward you appropriately so i've been trying to put this in context with a sort of harry braverman kind of framework and thinking about the dispossession of knowledge of the labor process so harry berman describes the process whereby you know workers are systematically dispossessed of knowledge of the labor process and the knowledge of work is sort of appropriate from the shop floor and made the exclusive purview of management so this process leaves management with control over each step of the labor process and its mode of execution and in the case of instagram under this new algorithmic management influencers have been dispossessed of that complete knowledge of the labor process the productivity influencers know that they're not visible to all of their following but they can't actually know when for whom and under what circumstances their content has been shown so they can't know when they've done enough and there's a sort of a reverse span optic kind of discipline that results here that you must constantly generate content to maintain optimal visibility visibility optimal engagement metrics and then consistent sponsorships from advertisers so it's a sort of a common refrain in any trade literature that instagram rewards consistency with visibility the corollary in that is that it can also punish inconsistency with by burying burying your posts torpedoing your engagement metric engagement groups where groups of influencers going to mutually agree to consistently comment on or like each other's posts no matter what it is or what whether or not they actually like it just depending on the expectations for group posts other members are obliged to respond quickly and with messages of at least four words always tailored to that content that's a very important stipulation you can't leave generic messages the prevailing knowledge is that you know real seemingly genuine engagement is going to trick the algorithm into picking these things up and the other thing is that you have to do this quickly within the first five minutes is the accepted knowledge that so long as the the content generates a lot of engagement quite quickly then you know you're more likely to again see that sort of amplified visibility and then increased engagement overall so these groups can be pretty exclusive particularly at the level of people who do this professionally as you know influencers but i do want to highlight that they kind of exist at varying levels right people work as influencers for you know things ranging from just products trades to you know million dollar sort of deals so there's they're certainly arranged in how exclusive these groups can be and then who's allowed in each one but at the level of people who do this professionally it is difficult to get into them i am finding at base this mutual back scratching is sort of meant to inflate these engagement metrics so that your content is prioritized in the algorithm and the goal is to improve the odds that your content is visible to your followers and that it gets picked up in  page so that you can reach new followers so whether or not comment pods actually achieve this goal is kind of an ongoing debate instagrams algorithm is continually changing and responding to the gaming practices of its users and then users sort of change to respond to that in kind of an ongoing game of cat and mouse which i find quite interesting but what i want to emphasize here is that comment pods are sort of a worker led cooperative designed to subvert the demands of instagram platform labor that these are not sort of the artifact of social media narcissism or sort of internet celebrity culture i've been working on sort of taking them seriously when they're understood from the perspective of that influencer this is sort of a small scale collective resistance against content selective algorithms that have effectively reconfigured their labour process in a way that allows instagram to control and intensify the working day so they constitute this small mobilization to maintain control over the labour process and to protect wages in the field of visibility labour so while this is quite different from traditional forms of labour organizing for you know control over the work and for higher wages it's one that i think responds to the material conditions of their work which are not really contained by the traditional parameters of an employee employer sort of workday i just have one kind of f of a bigger i don't know taking a broader view on some of these practices that i think is interesting and something i'm sort of trying to develop as well i want to point out that these activities sort of rely on an underlying contradiction of the measurement monetization of human expression and that you know social media sites kind of require they rely on our sincere participation social media sites in order to be like a useful saleable commodity to advertise they must then ask that we ignore the monetization of interactions and instead behave authentically which seems to sort of be a euphemism to for behave as if the logics of you know exchange do not underg do the activities that are going on online which we all kind of at this point understand is not the case so this is kind of becoming a bigger and bigger ask and the problem remains that it's very difficult to police sincerity which is why all the efforts to sort of shut down comment pods and reconfigure the algorithm is not necessarily going to solve the problem so i think comment pods represent the recognition that you know those logics of necessary sort of being your authentic self or your real self whatever that means they and they capitalized upon a system that sort of designed to data fie measure and assign value to people in so doing comic pad sort of destabilize the very business model of social media networks or the platform sorry they're sort of in danger of kind of turning into this hive of spammer ii and i'm sort of curious to see how that ends up playing out so that's all i couldn't wanted to say today thank you very much increasingly digital way of life has on culture politics and real world behaviors and the ways in which technology can reveal patterns and biases in our real life social systems she is currently an assistant arts professor of interactive media arts at n shanghai and in the fall we'll be starting as a doctoral student at the annenberg school for communication at the university of pennsylvania hi everybody thank you so much for being here today my name is rupa and i'm here to talk about my own practice so i will open by saying that in addition to the academic research that i do my research is also very practice based so i constantly exhibit and create work and i kind of make work that also ties in to the things that i'm writing about or thinking about as a scholar the artists practice kind of works together with that and i'm gonna be talking a project that i did about a project that i did in two thousand and sixteen called hashtag bellwether i will explain more about what this photo actually means in a little bit but basically it was a project that was commissioned by spaces in cleveland ohio which is one of the oldest alternative art spaces in the country during a residency that i was working on concurrently with the rnc's presence in cleveland in two thousand and sixteen so the exhibition was kind of going on at the same time that the rnc was located in cleveland and was running and so first i just want to give you guys a little bit of context as far as what i was thinking when i went into this and kind of the research that i've done in this stuff so i'm going to start with the political public opinion process so we seen things like this right this is nate silver's five hundred and thirty eight kind of an aggregate of all of the horse race polls and the horse race tracking that goes into presidential polling and political polling in general but in the two thousand and sixteen election starting with the primaries we started to see things like this right why the polls missed bernie sanders michigan upset there was something similar that happened in california where hillary clinton did much better than she was supposed to do because it was forecasted that bernie sanders was going to really take a big chunk out of her numbers that she was going to get in the states and obviously we all know what happened with the general election and all of the pollsters basically predicted a landslide hillary clinton victory and instead we ended up in the situation that were in now so i wanted to think about this in terms of what public opinion polls are doing there was a huge outcry out particularly after the election about how public opinion polling is wrong it's outdated we need a new system everybody's kind of criticizing it and really you know throwing it under the bus and i wanted to take a look at what is going on here and kind of some new methods that we can use to gauge political opinion and political sentiment so the first the two main problems with public opinion polling is that people aren't picking up the phone and when they do they aren't given many options as far as how to how to feel so the reason that picking up the phone is a problem is because the majority of public opinion polling is conducted on landlines still it's actually illegal to robo dial cell phones although a lot of you may be seeing a problem with that there's been an increased frequency in that lately but as it stands most pollsters will not use cell phones as a form of communication simply because they need to actually hire people to make these calls rather than farming it out to a whole bunch of machines to kind of send out automated message s this kind of targets wealthier more conservative people older people who tend to still have landlines installed and really kind of takes away from the voices of the lower income minority people who rely more on mobile devices as a form of communication and their primary method of internet and phone engagement so what happens is there's a phenomenon called non response bias where polster's try to wait for the people who don't respond because the opinions of the people who actually do pick up the phone will be markedly different from those who do not pick up the phone and this kind of leads to in their efforts to kind of forecast and prognosticate about what those people who aren't responding actually will think it leads to a lot of guesses and inaccuracy as far as what that polls actually say whether or not they reflect the actual opinion of the people who are asked secondly this is a screenshot from the pew research center leading up to the two thousand and twelve presidential election it's two questions that voters were asked on the phone the first is how much thought of you given to tuesday's presidential election and the second is how closely have you been following news about the candidates and you'll notice that there's five responses here that's it if you wanted to answer this question and you didn't want to fall into quite a lot some little or none your only option is to select don't know or refuse and this doesn't leave a lot of room for mixed feelings or really strong opinions that don't kind of fall into this category or kind of well i do like this person but here's a lot of reasons why i feel kind of hesitant about them and so on and so forth instead you're really constricted to a very narrow kind of dichotomy of emotion ranging from approval to disapproval and no room in between for any kind of things that deviate from that  so social media has been talked about a lot in a bunch of contexts in political campaigns we all know that social media is kind of used as a political campaign tool this is a screenshot from the wayback machine of barack obama's tweet the night that he won in two thousand and eight his campaign is really heralded as the kind of harbinger of a lot of new political campaign use of social media but we're also starting to see people using social media as an alternative or even a replacement for traditional polling practices so there have been a couple of index basically attempted to rank the sentiment of users talking about the political campaign that were being held but forced it into a really similar approval disapproval struck in a very similar way to get to traditional polls you can see the blue is actually the twitter index and the red is gallup right and they really closely mirror each other because they're basically trying to do the same thing the social media is being forced into this context that kind of really mirrors polling and so it's kind of being put into that same dichotomy of approval and dis approval the second the aps project does search for individual terms but it adds no context to those terms so for example if you had somebody searching for trump's muslim ban you didn't know whether or not somebody was for the ban or against the ban or was trying to look up more information about the band to figure out what it was all about all you had was that search term and all you got with the numerical graph of how often that term was searched for on these platforms right so my question is what about individual voices social media is kind this unprecedented way of millions of millions of people having their own individualized soapbox to kind of say whatever they want to say right and so how do we harness this really fickle and multifaceted nature to get a better perspective on public opinion  the political process so that leads me to this project hashtag bellwether this was kind of a response to you this idea about ohio's importance in the political process i'm actually from cleveland originally so i have a very personal connection to this also ohio as most of you know is a bellwether state it's used as kind of a an oracle or a kind of a predictor of who's actually gonna win the presidential election and so i wanted to get a sense of what these ohio voters were actually thinking and whether or not i could use social media to kind of get a better read on what the kind of mood was surrounding the political campaigns in the primaries in two thousand and sixteen so i started collecting data on august th two thousand and fifteen which was the first republican presidential debate and i ended on july twelve to two thousand and sixteen which was the day that bernie sanders endorsed hillary clinton for the democratic nomination and i ran a really simple script that basically was designed to collect as many tweets as i possibly could that mention any of the presidential candidates by name keep in mind that at the beginning when i started this script there were seventeen republicans running for the nomination and five democratic canada so i was searching for a lot of people and eventually after the data was all filtered down to tweets that were geo located to or specifically referencing ohio the number of ohio centric tweets i got was almost fifteen million so i had a really huge data set that i was able to work with then i ran them through a variety of  processes in a python script that i created myself basically forcing the candidates name into a variety of grammatical structures that you see here i have this nifty laser pointer that i can use to do this so candidates name plus is plus an adjective or candidates name plus is a disgrace cruz should be tried for treason clinton will say anything to win which i'm gonna come back to you in a second that's a very specific phrase that i saw popping up over and over again sanders wants change rubio wants to be the gop barack obama and kasich thinks a brokered convention would be fun and this kind of is it's really gives you a lot more insight into what people are actually saying rather than i like kasich or i hate kasich right it really gives specifics again which i'll talk about in a second so this is from a research trip that i took to the cleveland city club they have a really huge political memorabilia collection that kind of dates all the way back to andrew jackson's political campaign in the s and i took this idea of political campaign merchandise as a method that campaigns are using to disseminate very specific curated messages and i hacked it so you can see here that these all have the same graphic identities as all of the campaigns but they have been doctored to reflect what has been said about them on twitter rather than the really really highly vetted messages that traditionally appears so you're used to seeing sign like this for trump but instead it says trump is a liar because that's something that really appeared frequently throughout the process and i made a hierarchy to determine what kind of merchandise that was making for various points in the campaign the campaign button was the lowest tyr because it was just really cheap and easy for me to make them in bulk i had a machine i could turn out hundreds of them in an hour it was really simple bumper stickers came next because all i had to do was make the illustrator file and feed it into an inkjet printer then came the rally signs that i had custom made lawn signs which i had custom made and then assembled myself i'm missing the t shirt slide here but if we go back to this first slide the t shirts came on the next year right because i had to do the heat transfer myself and then finally for the tweets that ended up being super popular and really exponentially off the charts i made a two dimensional proof of specialty merchandise that related specifically to each campaign that if somebody wanted to buy it i would then custom make for them at the end of the exhibition so for example this references trump's famous cinco de mayo photograph somebody noticed that he was eating a taco salad on top of an old newspaper article about his ex wife marla maples in a bikini and so trump is eating a taco salad on top of a bikini clad photo of his ex wife got five thousand eight hundred and nine mentions in the may data and thus merited a proof of a may a doctor and make america great again hat and so this kind of points out to it they i mentioned that you got a better sense of what people actually were talking about in reference to these candidates but you also had multiple tweets that were saying pretty much the exact same thing in different ways you have things like hillary is a liar and hillary will say anything to win both of them are basically saying the same thing but one of them is acting very very specific and is referencing specific ways that they saw hillary clinton behaving during the campaign and what they thought about that behavior right rather than just a generic statement this also points to the fact that there were like two types of data that i saw frequently recurring throughout the process the first is really generic statement like hillary's a liar that appeared in a multitude of fashions throughout all the data that i collected the second is a highly specifically worded statement that is evidence of a mass retweet and so the bikini the bikini clad photo of his ex wife comment is another specific when it got five thousand eight hundred and nine mentions it's probably because one person tweeted it and then five zero people thought it was resonant enough to amplify in that one month the second is phrases that have a very specific cultural meaning that would not understand this you need a human reading it because then they can put the actual cultural reference together with the candidate and infer what ted cruz actually seemed like or what that tweeter or what the person who was tweeting actually thought about ted cruz from this statement so the project it started kind of as an examination of public opinion but it really ended up as a tribute to the diversity of opinions in ohio and kind of thinking about social media not necessarily in the same context that we've been examining public opinion polls but thinking about it in a new way and whether or not we can actually use language and context to evaluate social media in its own right as and that is it on its own entity kind of divorced from all of the previous historical readings o meyer is doctoral student in american studies at umd his research interest broadly include digital studies emerging media identity and community formation trauma studies and game studies his current work examines social media and shifting conceptions of power and privilege and the material consequences of these shifts so hi everybody i'm joseph and i actually just wanted to ask a real quick question before we started how many of you have actually heard about review bonding before okay i'm slightly shocked mainly because when i started doing this research when i just was thinking about this and i'll talk about this in a minute like even urban dictionary hadn't heard of review review bombing so it was very odd because it says this is something that i've seen happening for the last decade but it isn't actually within sort of like the internet spectrum so yeah so this is gonna be kind of like a wild ride so i'm gonna try to explain it is give you some examples and then get to my ultimate argument so hopefully i can do this in fifteen minutes it might be a little kinetic but we'll see let's see what happens but the first thing i want to do is actually start off with a story and this happened like literally like a day before also pulled out his restaurant from the trump towers so there's a very heated exchange and basically what ends up happening is this is super blown out so this is gonna suck but ultimately he tweets out after he tries to go to private party a pages and okay so you can't see anything but basically there it was actually kind of small there was only fifteen reviews that go up that are all one star is basically complaining about the bad food there is one however that is up here that context es that they say i can't believe that this establishment would do that to someone as great as jose andres right so this happens their yelp scores get slammed a little bit and it turns into a little thing but then we find out your friends whatever but this sort of like goes to show like sort of kind of how this like review bombing campaigns can happen and ultimately this triggered any sort of like this idea about what review bombs are and i started thinking back to what i've seen that practice which is in the gaming culture space so this happens a lot with games and we're gonna talk about that for a little bit just to contextualize it but before i do that i wanted to talk about sort of my approach to the internet because it's really interesting because we're we're like looking at a specific platform we're talking about data and then for me i go the opposite spectrum of just trying to read myself and follow all these networks of influence and connection okay and a lot of this is based on this idea called effective practice by margit wetherill which is basically thinking about like different things that that an event that makes things happen and then you follow all the things that both went into it and come out of it and it's like this this web of things that is exciting and terrifying and makes you go and this jose andres thing made me go huh right and then in order to actually analyze these things i practice bruno latour zakhar network theory which is basically the sociological concept of tracing associations creating like almost like an actual literal mapping of these controversies so what i like to do is i like to sort of like pair all the links all the connections all the ways that culture influences these sort of like interactions right and then finally in order to sort of get into analyzing these pieces i basically his whole thing is making sure that you that you you privilege the platform as well as the discourse all right and each platform in and of itself shifts those discourses based off of those users in the interactions okay so we're talking about you know like algorithms and platforms but it's also the platform's themselves and the users okay and so with review bombing what i'm looking at is actual reviews how are people using reviews to sort of create a discourse right and just to give you a definition that i've sort of come up with because  when i did this research a urban dictionary failed me and then both wikipedia and know your meme are only based around games which it does originated in gaming culture yeah so what is revue bombing it is the act  posting mass negative reviews about something online either through organizing your bots in order to harm its popularity or sales review bombing is primarily related to expressing dissatisfaction with the group or creator of the thing and not necessarily the thing itself and i kind of struggle with this like i use thing mainly because we're talking about the internet where we have objects but we've also commodified the self with commodified services we've commodified just the influencing itself so and and not necessarily that product or service that you do translates to the reviews that you get all right so this all starts with spore does anybody remember spore from two thousand and eight you know the the the galaxy simulator basically and what ends up happening is in two thousand and eight people get very upset and they bomb the crap out of this thing on amazon it's actually there's almost three thousand five hundred customer reviews and there's seventy six percent one stars i don't know how that thing's three and a half stars to be perfectly honest at this point but every single one was rallying against a feature in the game called digital rights management it's a piece of software that makes the can't copy it it's fighting piracy so most gamers that were buying spore i didn't really like the gameplay that much either but it was mainly against this added software this years later time so last september there was a developer who sends out this tweet saying we're filing a dmca takedown of pewdiepies firewatch content for any future campo santo games translation influencer on that platform and he has been in a little bit of hot water in a lot of spaces he had a lot of content with jokes about nazis and then this was actually that comes after that where he used a racial slur on his game stream and order to get it taken down and it's actually a huge issue so this is where all these platforms start interacting and it's weird right so what ends up happening though is gamers revolt they go on to the steam platform which is a digital distribution platform for games and start posting ideological spectrum has been broken right there they're saying that instead of focusing on the games on the products you have broken the pact that you've made with streamers with gamers by saying that you don't support the way that we express ourselves so we're going to economically damage you right and so this is kind of a shift in something from just the product itself or at least something tangentially related to the actual developers of that product and you know the my my favorite one was the sjw's are ruining everything which is a common frame phrase in a lot of these reviews okay all this to say is this is kind of where review blowing comes from and what steam ends up doing is it actually fundamentally changes its system for rating and reviewing where it makes only people who buy on the platform able to actually pos reviews and they also have these histograms that show you these these review bonds and you can see like when it came out in two thousand and sixteen it was pretty pretty highly rated nobody really cared and then right in september they get this massive drop alright and the idea is that this actually function and are like internet economy right and i came up with this huge list of all these good things that are not so good too if you start really thinking about it right and thinking through the sort of ways in which the bedrock principles of a lot of our online economies are based in places like amazon or ebay where reviews are like critical to their success right when amazon came out in ninety five everyone was like i can't believe that you're allowing both positive and negative reviews when ebay comes out it takes them two years and then they introduce seller reviews in ninety seven so this turns into this issue where all of these platforms are basing these things off of user reviews in this sort of techno libertarian utopia where everybody is a rational consuming thinker right and the issue is is when we have things that are also coming back into the real world through amazon books where only books with four six ratings or above are featured you can have things like review bombing campaigns that will actually stop the at least you know irl manifestation and stores on things like this so it starts thinking about the fact that if we're building these platforms on the rationalization that we're all just consuming beings that can give sort of unbiased objective accounting of reviews that's all fine but we're not right we  are sort of like able to sort of react to these things and this becomes issues in a lot of the platforms that we're using today things like prejudices that play out in our new ber right like  lower lower ratings for black and women drivers the amazon fake reviews i literally just saw a television like i think it was like in good morning america on tuesday where they were saying there hasn't been like a real influx of reviews on and sixteen that aren't fake which is bad right and actually the storming a book online is really interesting because it was about a book and i think two thousand and thirteen with michael jackson where they actually sort of review blom date like the fans because it was like painting a not so positive picture about him so all of these things sort of like go into the ways that these reviews operate and beyond that too we also like to play online all right many people will remember the three wolf moon shirt you know these reviews are are are sort of like internet legend in the sense of the fun you know and also marlon bondo which had all of my pictures are white and it's blown out in stinks but if everybody knows about marlon bondo john oliver's new book not only does it have almost unanimous five star reviews but then it has about three percent one star reviews but they're not review bombing they're trolling the hate readers that are trying to find negative reviews by saying i can't believe how pleased i am for this opportunity buy this book and promote the freedom right people really hate this if you give this book to the local library right so it's actually it's actually a reversal of review bombing in order to like go against hate readers right so all of these things are going on and ultimately this brings me to my last point and sort of the larger argument such question that i got brought to you about sort of how we can think of review bombing as sort of like these these reactionary consumer activists moments not necessarily movements but moments right anyways this is you can't you probably can't read the whole thing but it's a new it's a facebook group that actually just recently got reinstated which is kind of weird but it's called down with disney's treatments of franchises and its fanboys and i don't go there because they're actually doing a campaign right now to spoil  and if you're like me you're not going til sunday night and you're sad about it so i have to avoid the internet at the rising the web but you know basically they are there they're their main goal is to speak out and say that there's nothing wrong with being a straight white male person i mean representation and this group has claimed responsibility for the review bombing campaign against the last jedi which has a ninety one percent rotten tomato meter but then its audience score is sitting at forty seven percent with like i think it's a hundred hundred ninety one thousand reviews most of which are one star and half stars very few with more content than i can't believe they don't have white guys  is ruining everything all that kind of stuff so ultimately they claimed responsibility for that using bots and also organizing campaigns like one that they tried to do for panther which was tweeted out that also had about three thousand five hundred people that had joined to actually do this this review bond with black panther when it came out ultimately it got shut down and facebook's shut down the group they're suddenly back i'm just recently which was great for me because i had that slide which is still bowing out so i guess it's not that great but it's not good because of the ways that platforms were actually like taking responsibility for these actions but they also still claimed responsibility for getting black panther to seventy nine percent review score which is at which they say is below wonderwoman this is also a  food so part of its alright white male conspiracy the other part is dc eu fanboys are mad that their movies aren't getting rated is as high so you know ultimately the the ways that these emotions play out on these online platforms becomes issues both in visibility but also can have real world consequences as we start seeing the ways that these different platforms are sort of like going through our lives and ultimately this was a journey to the question and not necessarily an answer to it but something through that observation of going through these little lines of of networks and connections and ultimately i hope that this gets you thinking a little bit more about when you're rating and reviewing i sure do and with that i hope you rate review subscribe like and share with your friends thank you is a journalist and musician enrolled at columbia journalism school he has experience in television production newspaper and magazine journalism and his research interests include piracy and in from informality excuse me in the culture industry of  a journalist primarily in a musician from pakistan i've been doing this work for the past seven years my interest in sort of the workings of the pakistani music industry i sort of got interested in them because it's more the passion project  professional i became a musician and then i realized that there was no real means of making money or distribution of music in pakistan so i became a journalist and several years later i realized that there's no money in journalism either so after seven years i'm standing at a point where there are only two things that i'm good at and can make money from either butt jokes apart one of my mentors was killed by the taliban in two thousand and sixteen i come from a country most of you know which is usually in the news for its violence and political instability  since about eighty zero people and that's that's a pretty low figure that's that's sort of an estimated eighty zero people have died in in violence and political instability and that just continues to be the same how that's connected to pakistani music is extremely interesting  because athlete religious extremists have been directly targeting musicians and that has sort of endangered and that's one of the reasons why why this has become more of an existential question for me and that's how i began investigating it  so just to give you a background of the part of the world that i come from pakistan gained independence india gained independence from british colonizers in one thousand nine hundred and forty seven two independent countries were formed pakistan and india so the announcement of the had a small time radio station and during the early years magicians were sort of hired by the music music station and it used to record and air their music there was no concept of mixing or mastering music or production of any any sort it was al present day pakistan which is the city of lahore so film production houses were present there and they were the ones who were sort of helping these musicians gain some momentum find jobs with state radio so that was primarily how things began in pakistan what's  been extremely interesting in the music industry and in the culture industry itself is that there has always been a monopoly of one person or what one person or the other so initially for the first thirty or forty years it was state radio and i there's a business there's an ethnic group in that city which which is sort of very politically and religiously conservative they call them memens and they're primarily business oriented people so this one particular gentleman by the name of  this community was sort of very tightly knit in the in the sense that they had these stage shows a very local form of theatre that they would conduct in karachi and for many of the families that had moved to the middle east what they would do is they would record those those shows on  from pakistan so he set up a shop in karachi in the industrial complex of the city and he started selling those cds start to bring them regularly at that time series were primarily manufactured in east asia which is a singapore a sort of confiscated in about forty countries of the world and that's when these governments really started to put pressure on pakistan to take against them now the pirate that i just wanted to show you here this gentleman here he was sort of the benevolen musician you can just go walk up to him like he's a rat in this factory surrounded by some of the very famous musicians of that time if you don't use ition you don't have any money you can just walk up to him he's gonna give you bags of cash to record and produce your music and once you're done you can come back with the cd he's gonna make there were there were several complaints officially sent to the pakistani government there was a congressional delegation that came to pakistan they tried to get in touch through the world trade organization and then finally the fbi sent a detailed dossier of documents they link established a link between the seri pirates and the taliban so the theory was that the music that was being made through the music and film industry this distribution of pirated cds was being sent back to afghanistan in pakistan the bordering region to fund launched an anti piracy operation which was the largest in pakistan in history and one of the largest across the world i just give you some quick statistics about about the size of this and the scale of their operations so the international federation of photographic industry which sort of protects the interests of record labels they said that under record label business across the world was over one hundred and fifty million dollars and that was only by this one individual so if you if you combine the figures from all of the others as cook this goes to several billion dollars so that happen and then and then the pakistani government shut all of these factories down as a result of which the pakistani music industry today has absolutely no infrastructure whether that's legal or illegal in terms of music distribution  two thousand and eight violence has peaked in pakistan so there is no concept of life shows or anything whatsoever it's just getting slightly better nowadays but there's still a long way to go i'm sure you've heard of the many organized assaults that have happened over the past few years hundreds of people have died in them there was an attack on a situation like this a company like the coca cola steps in makes a killing of the situation and becomes pakistan's most popular soft drink pepsi has dominated the the soft drink market in that part of the world for the past sixty years and  have you in light of the revelations about russian botnets have you gone back and cross checked your data and seeing to see which if any of those things you investigate it and maybe printed we're being pushed by russian and other botnets and so that's a really good question and that's a question that i get pretty much every single time i talk about this project especially in light of recent events i've not done an extensive cross check at this point only because my life has gotten sucked up into a lot of things but i think the interesting thing about the project is that even if the original source of a tweet was a bot and even if you know  chunk of the retweets or a bot in order to make it into kind of the data it also had to be retweeted by a bunch of other real life people too so i think that that's also significant the originator of the tweets may not have all necessarily been human but the fact that they kind of escalated to the point that they did in the data to varying degrees mean meant that people found them agreed or disagreed with them enough to amplify them to that extent so i do think it is still an interesting reflection on what people were actually thinking at the time and also this was the primaries so this kind of you know it's it's yet to be saying that there was a obviously there was a very significant influence in russian interference during the general election during the primaries because of the volume of the candidates and the amount that people were talking about the volume of the candidates and because i started before it was significant that trump was gonna win and before anybody had any idea that that was gonna happen we might not see that as an insane degree had i done this project during the general life um this question is about the instagram comment pods i'm very interested in the in the parallel as between what they're doing and and labor organizing  interesting difference is that the people paying them are not the people against whom they're organizing they're organizing against a platform here and which is a third party and so i'm wondering whether whether that introduces this weird dynamic where the platform is ostensibly trying to help there you know there's not the adversarial relationship between like labor and capital is  but is there a sense with which we saw the the the pushback against the non chronological timeline is there is there organized pushback against the introduction of new analytics generally is it the analytics that that impose those new costs and is there organization that's aimed at the platform's more specifically yeah thank you for that question actually um i've been thinking about that sort of triad of this sort of labor relationship in that you know you have the advertiser who actually pays for the work the instagrammer who does the work and then the platform on and through which the work is done so it is sort of an interesting moment of  you know what i'm talking about is algorithmic management i mentioned briefly in there that you know they it is sort of the platform's job to set the pace of production to organize how the work is done and so yeah in that interesting way it does play a very specific and unique role i suppose for their work as far as organizing against sort of you know the metra fication of what they do records there's something intangible about influence not that i've seen  and you know i would be curious if anybody has you know any instances of that what i will say though it's it's interesting to hear influencers talk about their relationship with the platform and and how that's you know they don't see well i'll say this i think the potential for resistance you know when you're about like an influencers work in relation to a platform i think is in the way that you know they don't see any loyalty to the platform the platform is sort of a tool it's sort of this neutral thing that they kind of work through and i think in that there's you know sort of a unique space to kind of organize and think of these creative ways to kind of undermine how it organizes their work  but at the same time it's very difficult to sort of you know have some sort of collective organizing against a tool you know that it's also not an adversarial sort of relationship that they see there so that it's sort of an ambiguous kind of space and i think it's a unique kind of moment early on to sort of capture how they articulate you know what that relationship is and if it's adversarial or if it's sort of you know this beautiful thing that has sort of helped them gain the followers that they haven't have the life that they do so so the short answer to your question is no then there's not really sort of an organized effort to combat that sort of metra fication of influence but there are a lot of really interesting ways that people are sort of undermining the platform through you know bots is an interesting one too i think there's some potential for labor organizing in bots just in the way that it allows us to log if you think that what we were reacting to or what your audience in the piece reacts to more is the fact that it takes on the branded aspect of the campaign or the material aspect of the paraphernalia that is i see it in a hat i see it in a t shirt or i see it in the crews logo i see it in the hillary logo so i think it's a combination of both i think that people one react to just generally you know this idea of culture jamming objects that we see every day and you know there's a whole kind of art study of culture jamming and kind of taking on things that are prevalent in everyday life and then tweaking them to reflect the opposite or to subvert them or to kind of present an alternative viewpoint so i think people inherently respond to that but then i also think that people immediately afterwards people kind of like jump to oh what if somebody was actually wearing that as a campaign button or oh what if somebody was actually wearing that as a t shirt and so i think that being able to physically see it in the real world kind of takes this content that if we were to see it online we just kind of brush it off as like oh you know that's just another person tweeting something stupid like whatever it's not a big deal and then really actually seeing it on a physical object puts it in a different context and makes  think about it and appreciate it a little bit more and that kind of speaks to the exhibit itself so i had people coming in through there who would then come up to me afterwards and say it took a really long time for me to find anything that i actually agreed with in here and they would spend hours and hours and hours looking through all of the material the final installation like had all the lawn signs throughout the gallery on the floor i mounted them on like foam to represent astroturf right and they would take hours to look through everything in the gallery and they were like i can't find anything that i agree with and so i think that materiality also in being able to look at things in a d physical space kind of makes people question their own bubbles online and makes people think about being the the content that they encounter on their kind of really curated timelines and people agree with everything and bringing it into the real world not only kind of makes them think about it in a different way but also kind of alerts them to the fact that in the real world you might not be sitting next to somebody who really agrees with you the way that somebody who's next to you and your just looking at those the arrangement of of instruments there suggests a very certain disposition in regarding to things like harmonics scales and structure and traditional and forms of making music which which represent like a traditionally like western range particularly a flake for like coax music for their adverts for example would all be using those sorts of instruments these are the ones i've ever heard have so i just wonder whether or not you see a trend in how  actually pushing this new content out so primarily the idea with this show is fusion music this sort of trying to record pakistan's musical heritage and by that i also mean india's musical heritage so what they're trying to do here is that there are certain it's a very slick but at the same time it's also very local in this there's been a sort of to certain extent there has been a creative freedom for the producers because they're all from they're all some of the leading names of the pakistani music industry we've also had people from india come to pakistan