Forming an Opposition Media Bloc in the Network Era

The personalization of power under Donald Trump has proceeded with terrifying speed in the first two months of his administration. His institutional enemies are being crushed left and right, from big law firms who have represented opponents or progressive causes, to universities. And of course, before he even entered office, he had already begun his attack on media organizations.

It is tempting to suppose that the role of an adversarial press is to make information available to voters and correct the lies or misleading statements made by authorities. In other words, one might take an intellectual view of the matter, that a good media system ought to be judged by its ability to produce and encourage the development of accurate knowledge in media consumers.

That is certainly part of it. But what is needed, right now, today, is not particularly intellectual. Indeed, it is almost mechanical, more an exercise of social power than of academic virtue. What is needed is an adversarial media bloc that is large enough and loud enough to credibly challenge the administration’s ability to act.

This is not the deranged daydream of someone addicted to posting. It is not absurd to assert that institutions with a high capacity for deploying physical force can be checked by individuals and organizations who produce nothing but messages. 

Authoritarians clearly believe this, for not a single one fails to do everything in their power to take control of their national media systems.

What exactly is the power that the media holds, which governments fear? Can an opposition wield this power effectively today, in our fragmented, asynchronously-consumed online media environment?

Media has the power to produce shared understandings. Under the right conditions, it can help us feel less alone in our discontents, influencing a perception that we are part of something greater.. Alternatively, some media systems may promote a self-fulfilling perception of isolation. Many popular theories of digital media posit it can only ever serve the latter function; I will argue below that this is not straightforwardly the case. We can, and indeed must, use every type of media we can to produce a sense of solidarity among a sizable opposition.

Bandwagons, not defectors

When social scientists—particularly economists—attempt to apply game theory to real world phenomena, they too often turn to the prisoner’s dilemma. In the prisoner’s dilemma, the best possible outcome for an individual is to defect when the other player chooses to cooperate.

In the titular example, if you have two suspects of a crime, and one cuts a deal while the other stays silent, the defector gets a shorter sentence and the cooperator gets a longer sentence than if both had stayed silent. Knowing this, there’s a high chance that both will choose to try and cut a deal, even though that is the worse outcome for both of them than if both had stayed silent.

There are certainly areas where this model is useful. But far more often, especially when looking at large scale social phenomena, coordination games provide a better lens. In these models, the winning move is to bandwagon; that is, to figure out what move everyone else is going to make, and then make it too.

The political scientist Naunihal Singh modeled military coups on a cooperation game in which different actors have different preferred outcomes, yet the overwhelming incentive is to simply choose what everyone else is choosing. In practical terms this may mean that as a major in the military, you may oppose a particular ethnic group gaining more power, or you may be anti-communist or anti-fascist, or may simply be against the military taking power directly, but ultimately if you believe that enough other members of the military will support a coup by any of these groups, you will support it as well. (Singh 2014, 24-27)

Russell Hardin similarly argues that constitutions are coordinating devices, not social contracts. He notes that while “There might have been other, substantially different constitutions that could have been defended as cogently as that which the Philadelphia Convention proposed,” once “many of the most important political leaders of the thirteen states spent a few hot months in Philadelphia hammering out” one specific one they could all sign off on, that was the only viable option. (Hardin 1999, 102) Once they did so, and “enough other states ratified it,” opponents like Edmund Randolph who had walked away from convention without signing ended up voting for ratification in Virginia.

Randolph was criticized as inconsistent, but wrongly. What he wanted in Philadelphia was national union under a different constitution. But by the time of the Virginia Convention, there was no chance that there could be such an outcome because national union under the Philadelphia Constitution was virtually certain. Therefore his choice had been reduced to that between national union under that constitution with Virginia in it or national union without Virginia. (Hardin 1999, 103)

In other words, regardless of Randolph’s preferences in terms of constitutional design, once a bandwagon was in effect, the sensible thing to do was to join.

What does all of this have to do with the media? In addition to its function as distributor of information and forum for persuasion, media has a powerful coordination function.

Making a fact

In the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and in the actions of Israeli settlers expanding their territory in the West Bank, observers and even participants speak of “creating facts on the ground.” This means successfully changing the status quo to such an extent that the changes would be very difficult to reverse. It is a de facto approach to creating change that flouts de jure approaches which respect domestic and international law, and indeed it is an affront to the very idea of the rule of law.

A coup by its nature operates on similar logic. Successful coups manage, in Singh’s terminology, to “make a fact”:

If the strategic logic of a coup attempt is one of coordination, then we would expect a coup to be won by the side that is best at manipulating information and expectations, which is not necessarily the side with the most brute force or popularity. To succeed, the challengers must convince the rest of the military that their victory is a fait accompli, so that each actor believes that the others are likely to support the coup. When this manipulation is done properly, these expectations become self-fulfilling, with actors joining the coup because they believe that others will, thus making these expectations a reality. I call this process of shaping information and expectations so as to herd key actors into consensus around one outcome “making a fact.” (Singh 2014, 22)

While some figures, notably top military leadership who meet with one another regularly, may be able to consolidate this entirely out of view of the public, most must rely on public media to make a fact. Broadcast is especially effective for this, particular in those countries with official government radio and television stations that are listened to broadly:

A broadcast is not only heard by everyone, but everybody knows that everybody else has heard it, and everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody has heard it, ad infinitum. The content of a broadcast becomes what I call public information, claims and statements that are common knowledge for members of the target audience. (Singh 2014, 28)

We will discuss the relative power of broadcast compared to other mediums further down; the key point here is the power of media to produce public information. Public information has the potential to make a fact, not just in the coordination game in play when a group is attempting a coup, but more broadly. 

Consider Henry Farrell’s contention that it’s “not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings.” The object of his criticism focuses on the idea of “reflective beliefs,” or “something that you know you are supposed to believe, and publicly affirm that you believe but might or might not subscribe to personally.” This is very similar to Lisa Wadeem’s observation that authoritarian regimes often ask nothing more than that citizens behave “as if” they support the government and believe in its many outlandish claims. “Citizens in Syria are not required to believe the cult’s flagrantly fictitious statements and, as a rule, do not. But they are required to act as if they do.” (Wedeen 1998, 506)

Reflective beliefs and “as if” support are things that can be shaped through public information. If certain talking points and behaviors become perceived as being a key component of membership in some group, the members of that group will bandwagon into adopting those talking points and behaviors. This is true in everything from the fashions adopted by a music subculture to the arguments made by partisans.

This is what is at stake in the consolidation of an opposition media bloc: the ability to coordinate on group action of any kind that challenges the regime. Right now, for example, large law firms seem poised to join a bandwagon started by Paul Weiss. A media bloc that had reach within the law community could amplify the figures who are trying to coordinate on the opposite outcome, to help make their voices sound like a chorus rather than a scattered and isolated set of individual speakers. It is impossible to say ahead of time whether or not large law firms will all cave, but a strong opposition media bloc can make it more likely that people will behave as if they believe the firms will stand strong. In doing so, it can make that united opposition a fact.

Less hypothetically, there are protests occurring around the nation today, which are growing at a faster rate than they did in 2017. Republicans are facing incredibly hostile town halls. Constituent calls are coming in faster than members of Congress can process them. People are angry, and they are mobilized. And if there is anything that the Trump era ought to have decisively taught us all, it is not because of direct, unmediated experience of the bad consequences from the Trump administration’s actions. This mobilization must be a result of public information produced by media; the public’s anger is a “fact” that has been successfully “made.”

It is not that Americans have touched a stove and been burned. It’s that we have successfully told many of them that stoves are hot. It’s rather a shame we failed to do so before November.

The new media landscape

Broadcast is unique in its potential for creating public information. Every authoritarian is well aware of this, and pays special attention to broadcast. Xavier Márquez notes that the bribery regime in 1990s Peru “unravelled when one of his videotapes found its way to the one TV station he had not thought worth bribing (given its small audience and interest in maintaining a ‘clean’ reputation),” leading the the mobilization of opposition in the 2000 election and successfully defeating the incumbent party. A clear demonstration of the power that even a relatively small broadcast channel can have. In Venezuela, meanwhile, the government “puts a lot more emphasis on controlling and creating its own mass media (primarily TV and community radio stations funded by the government) and pressuring existing TV stations to limit their criticism of the government than on controlling newspapers or Internet fora, which are more fragmented and less accessible to the vast majority of the population.” (Marquez 2017, 141)

Marquez is quite skeptical about “the intrinsic ability of social media to help mobilize opposition to authoritarian regimes,” noting that authoritarians “have developed many tactics to pollute the information commons and monitor potentially dangerous people.” (ibid) Espen Geelmuyden Rød and Nils B Weidmann also found that most authoritarians who engage in censorship are more likely to “adopt and expand the Internet” and that thusfar online technologies have not “contributed to a global shift towards democracy.” (Rød and Weidmann 2015)

In the era of the big three broadcasters, not only did programming in the prime time slot reach large audiences, but the fact that nearly everyone else you might talk to had also seen something in those slots was well known. As Singh put it, everyone knew that everyone else knew what had been in those broadcasts. This put the content of them securely in the realm of public information.

Traditional broadcast programs occurred only at a specific time of day, seen by all viewers simultaneously. It is a synchronous media, in other words. Print media, by contrast, are by their nature asynchronous. Whether it’s the 18th century, the 20th, or the 21st, a newspaper or a magazine can be read at whatever time of day, or indeed whatever day, the owner wishes. Moreover, two people with the same newspaper may not even read the same articles in it. I cannot infer from the fact that I have read one column in The New York Times that other readers of the Times have read that particular column. Print media does not produce public information as reliably as broadcast.

This does not mean that print media is incapable of producing public information at all; the revolutions of the 18th and 19th century were very much mobilized by print media. The dynamic is simply different, and far less immediate.

Much has been written about what the Internet has added to this mix. Text, audio, and video are all available over it, of course. The great body of these are experienced asynchronously, like traditional print media. But live streaming is an industry in its own right. Moreover, digital technology does not just integrate the characteristics of print and broadcast, but of communications technologies such as the telephone and telegraph as well. In many corners of the web, the boundary between audience and content creator is quite blurred, with Twitch streams allowing live audiences to talk to the streamer as well as one another, while others might discuss the recording after the fact on social media.

In short, digital media includes both synchronous and asynchronous elements, as well as one to many, many to one, many to many and one to one. Moreover, everything that occurs over it is stored somewhere; every time a video is watched, this event and information about it is saved somewhere. Every email or chat message lives on a server. The formerly ephemeral, like an off the cuff conversation, are stored by third parties by default.

It is difficult to characterize the overall impact of all of this. Some people claim that the Internet has caused the media to fragment. There are practically as many sources of information as there are people connected to the Internet. This is almost the opposite extreme from the circumstances during the Big Three era in America, but it makes even Cable TV’s fragmentation of viewership in the 90s seem like small potatoes by comparison.

Nevertheless, in some ways audiences are more concentrated than they have ever been. Network science has demonstrated over and over again that if gaining one more member of your audience increases your odds of getting yet another, “by even a fractional amount,” the resulting distribution of attention will follow a power law distribution, where 20 percent of the content creators have 80 percent of the audience. In reality, the odds are increased by much more than a fractional amount, and the skew is far sharper—more like 1 percent of content creators getting 99 percent of the audience.

So is the fragmentation thesis wrong? Not really. The absolute number of creators is mind bogglingly vast. 1 percent of such a number is itself a very large number. Certainly more than three, but many orders of magnitude larger than the number of Cable TV channels. And beyond the creators at the head of the distribution, there is a long, long tail of creators, largely amateurs and hobbyists, who may get a few dozen or a few hundred people in their audiences. These people aren’t moving nations but they do have influence, sometimes quite strong influence, on their tiny little audiences.

Another important aspect of this fragmented-yet-concentrated landscape we find ourselves in concerns topics and events. Just as attention is concentrated among a small percentage of content creators, so too is attention concentrated on a small certage of topics. When insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on January 6. 2021, American professional and social media focused on this event almost at the complete exclusion of all other topics. And indeed, global attention was concentrated as well, just as large global audiences tuned into events in South Korea when now-former President Yoon declared martial law early last December. However, people experience these events through a plethora of media sources; I myself experienced January 6 primarily on Twitter, and the South Korea martial law crisis through Bluesky.

In both cases, videos of uncertain provenance circulated freely on social media, where they were very widely shared within seconds, creating the same sort of immediacy one might expect of a synchronous media. Article links to more (and less) respectable publications were shared as news broke. In the Liberal Currents Discord server, we discussed what reports we did or did not find credible, and what we thought would happen, and any other reaction anyone felt like sharing or any question that might occur to us. The group chat was very much synchronously experienced among those who participated.

Public information very much can and is created under these conditions. But it is created by different publics, which produce different information, different reflective beliefs. The January 6 insurrectionists and President Yoon failed to make a fact; the results of the 2020 election were upheld and Yoon was forced to end martial law and was eventually removed from office. The opposition to Yoon, meanwhile, successfully made a fact over the course of an evening; they demonstrated to observers in the military that lower level soldiers would not fire on protesters or members of the National Assembly, which caused military leadership to bandwagon against Yoon’s coup attempt. The members of the National Assembly also held a vote to end the martial law that evening, a largely symbolic act which also helped to make the fact of the coup’s failure.

Public information can be produced in the new media environment, and it can be a valuable tool of opposition. It is just unwieldy and difficult to get results reliably.

Let’s make some facts

As Hardin put it, institutions are held together through coordination. Because any one actor expects that everyone who matters will stand united to punish anyone who deviates from the coordinated-upon arrangement, everyone does their part to maintain the status quo, including the existing institutional procedures for making any updates to that status quo.

Personalist dictators set themselves up by de-institutionalizing such arrangements. Donald Trump will do something unprecedented and outrageous, like blatantly punishing a law firm whose clients have opposed him in the past. In theory that law firm should respond by filing a lawsuit in order to adjudicate the legality of this action. If they believe that other firms will seek to avoid this slow and costly procedure and simply find a way to come to terms with Trump, however, it can trigger a bandwagon, as all targeted firms do the same thing rather than fighting their fate. This can lead to a new coordinated outcome, in which law firms refuse to represent the enemies of Donald Trump and accommodate his personal whims in any way they can. In short, Donald Trump is seeking to make a fact, to remake the political organization of the legal community so that it is subject to his personal power.

In thinking about how we can effectively oppose what Trump and Musk are doing, we should let go of the idea that we need to reach the great mass of the voting public. Right now, we are not trying to win an election. We are doing damage control, trying to delay the destruction of our system and the consolidation of Trump’s personal power for as long as we can. To that end, targeted mobilization can make a crucial difference.

For example: as stated, the legal profession is currently under attack. The information strategy most likely to help make a fact of coordinated resistance to that attack is less likely to originate from CNN or The New York Times than from a legal trade press, or even a legal conference.

Of course, most of us are not in the legal profession, and Liberal Currents does not have some special reach there. But all of us are in some industry, industries which have their own presses and events. Now is the time to do everything we can to lay the groundwork for bandwagoning into an adversarial stance when the time comes. 

An obvious place to begin is with (within-industry) coverage and talks about DEI in the face of the administration’s assault on it. Highlight every court victory you can, amplify every scrap of gossip suggesting top executives are considering standing by existing practices. The point is not to make a moral or intellectual defense of DEI but to influence the perception of how much support there already is for defending them against threats by the federal branch. 

Public feeds can take the place that public squares did in the 18th century revolutions, with the important caveat that platforms put their thumbs on the dial of who gets heard. To that end Bluesky remains an important place for a fairly broad cross section of the opposition to discuss, debate, and share information and ideas. Group chats are more analogous to cafes and meeting places, creating public information among mini-publics. All of these serve to coordinate on strategy across industry and locality.

And of course, we need to continue growing the audiences and reputation of openly adversarial outlets. You can help us do so here by becoming a patron or making a donation.

Perhaps most significantly from a mass impact perspective, we need to use all of the above tools to get major TV news anchors and pundits to commit to an openly adversarial stance, as many as we can get. Many of them are on Bluesky now, or read opposition press privately. Others can be reached through a degree of separation; their peers or staff are on Bluesky, or in a group chat you yourself may participate in. The more of these we can consolidate into a bloc, the more capable the opposition becomes of making a fact—or, more importantly, of stopping the Trump and Musk administration from doing so.

Bibliography

Hardin, Russell. Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc, 1999.

Márquez, Xavier. Non-Democratic Politics: Authoritarianism, Dictatorship, and Democratization. London: Palgrave, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2017.

Rød, E. G., & Weidmann, N. B.. “Empowering activists or autocrats? The Internet in authoritarian regimes.” Journal of Peace Research, 52(3) (2015): 338-351. 

Singh, Naunihal. Seizing power: The strategic logic of military coups. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.

Wedeen, Lisa. “Acting ‘As If’: Symbolic Politics and Social Control in Syria.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, no. 3 (1998): 503–23. 

Featured image is August 1991 coup, by David Broad