Computational Propaganda and Political Big Data: Moving Toward a More Critical Research Agenda.

Computational propaganda has recently exploded into public consciousness. The U.S. presidential campaign of 2016 was marred by evidence, which continues to emerge, of targeted political propaganda and the use of bots to distribute political messages on social media. This computational propaganda is both a social and technical phenomenon. Technical knowledge is necessary to work with the massive databases used for audience targeting; it is necessary to create the bots and algorithms that distribute propaganda; it is necessary to monitor and evaluate the results of these efforts in agile campaigning. Thus, a technical knowledge comparable to those who create and distribute this propaganda is necessary to investigate the phenomenon. However, viewing computational propaganda only from a technical perspective—as a set of variables, models, codes, and algorithms—plays into the hands of those who create it, the platforms that serve it, and the firms that profit from it. The very act of making something technical and impartial makes it seem inevitable and unbiased. This undermines the opportunities to argue for change in the social value and meaning of this content and the structures in which it exists. Bigdata research is necessary to understand the sociotechnical issue of computational propaganda and the influence of technology in politics. However, big data researchers must maintain a critical stance toward the data being used and analyzed so as to ensure that we are critiquing as we go about describing, predicting, or recommending changes. If research studies of computational propaganda and political big data do not engage with the forms of power and knowledge that produce it, then the very possibility for improving the role of social-media platforms in public life evaporates. Definitionally, computational propaganda has two important parts: the technical and the social. Focusing on the technical, Woolley and Howard define computational propaganda as the assemblage of social-media platforms, autonomous agents, and big data tasked with the manipulation of public opinion. In contrast, the social definition of computational propaganda derives from the definition of propaganda—communications that deliberately misrepresent symbols, appealing to emotions and prejudices and bypassing rational thought, to achieve a specific goal of its creators—with computational propaganda understood as propaganda created or disseminated using computational (technical) means. Propaganda has a long history. Scholars who study propaganda as an offline or historical phenomenon have long been split over whether the existence of propaganda is necessarily detrimental to the functioning of democracies. However, the rise of the Internet and, in particular, social media has profoundly changed the landscape of propaganda. It has opened the creation and dissemination of propaganda messages, which were once the province of states and large institutions, to a wide variety of individuals and groups. It has allowed cross-border computational propaganda and interference in domestic political processes by foreign states. The anonymity of the Internet has allowed stateproduced propaganda to be presented as if it were not produced by state actors. The Internet has also provided new affordances for the efficient dissemination of propaganda, through the manipulation of the algorithms and processes that govern online information and through audience targeting based on big data analytics. The social effects of the changing nature of propaganda are only just beginning to be understood, and the advancement of this understanding is complicated by the unprecedented marrying of the social and the technical that the Internet age has enabled. The articles in this special issue showcase the state of the art in the use of big data in the study of computational propaganda and the influence of social media on politics. This rapidly emerging field represents a new clash of the highly social and highly technical in both