Citation

Communication, Propaganda, and Digital Labor

Author:
Arriagada, Arturo; Duffy, Brooke Erin; Santana, Luis E.; Shorey, Samantha; Woolley, Samuel
Year:
2018

The November 2018 Social Media Culture Conference convened a group of communication scholars and practitioners, students, and public officials for a two day event organized by the School of Communications and Journalism at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago, Chile. While the event explored various dimensions of social media culture, the implications of digital transformation in political and economic spheres were the main focus. In this regard, the first central theme was the spread of disinformation, the concurrent rise of computational propaganda challenging democratic systems; a second was the production, circulation, and monetization of online content by seemingly amateur cultural producers. Conference participants addressed the former with possible solutions, discussing the pros and cons involved – i.e., would increased regulation inadvertently threaten human rights activism in autocratic countries? –, and used the case of social media influencers in the latter to explore themes of value, labor, and commercialism. On the next pages, the authors reproduce for the reader’s edification the results of the different exchanges that took place during conference lectures, workshops, and discussions.