Approaching the Phenomenon of 'Dark Political Communication'

The final presenters at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference this evening are my QUT colleagues Stephen Harrington and Tim Graham, presenting a pilot project leading into a larger research project on ‘dark political communication’: expanding from a narrow focus on disinformation to examine the problematic communication strategies of political elites for political gain. One strategy in such communication is disinformative attacks: here, political actors make specific false claims regarding their political opponents, and manage to get these covered by journalists because journalism has a negativity bias, conflict bias, and/or an immediacy and timeliness bias. Such attacks seem to remain undertheorised in political communication literature.

Such attacks can even be used by political actors to pre-excuse future retaliatory actions: this follows the concept of ‘accusation in a mirror’, where political enemies are accused of plotting precisely the same transgressions that the political actor themself is planning to commit. Donald Trump, for instance, has long claimed to be the target of political persecution, and is now increasingly suggesting that he will engage in such political persecution himself if he wins the next election; similar logics underlie the ‘false flag’ rhetoric commonly used by far-right actors.

Such rhetoric then solidifies into widely circulating counter-factual narratives, such as the false claims that Antifa burned American cities to the ground or that Black Lives Matter activists killed people; these are then also used in the political rhetorical strategy of whataboutism.

This may also be understood as reactive co-radicalisation, which has been observed as anti-Islamic groups in the west have become more radical in response to a perceived radicalisation of Islam that is not actually borne out by the facts. The unfounded belief that the other side gets away with things results in the further radicalisation of fringe actors, in other words.

This pilot study examined these concepts further through an analysis of some 2.5 million Reddit comments on left- and right-wing subreddits in the second half of 2020; right-wing communities were a great deal more active, but there seemed to be no other very obvious activity patterns here. But using Granger causality, there is some indication that activity in left-wing subreddits does seem to be related somewhat to right-wing subreddits: at leas by this (not entirely unproblematic) measure, spikes in activity in right-wing subreddits ‘Granger-cause’ spikes in left-wing subreddits.