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Dark Participation
Dark participation is an umbrella term for manipulative online communication, encompassing all the ways that online participation generates deliberately negative and often destructive content. It ranges from trolling of a single individual by another individual to hate campaigns directed at individuals or groups to the deliberate spread of disinformation by state-sponsored actors to large population groups.
Dark participation is typically generated by bad actors of many kinds. Sometimes individuals or groups spew hatred on individuals or organizations who say or do something they do not like. Often, dark participation is used strategically: Interest groups, political or ideological extremists, or state actors deliberately spread disinformation or distribute fake news as a way to sow discord and doubt in a population facing important decisions on policies and leadership.
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The best way to recognize dark participation is through media literacy, sometimes referred to as media education—deliberate cultivation of the skills to evaluate and analyze media. It is essentially the application of critical thinking to communications of all kinds. It is especially warranted when encountering messages that are surprising, counterintuitive, or represent an extreme view.
Among the most important questions to ask on reviewing any piece of information:
• Is it accurate?
• Is there an identifiable, reliable source of the information, and who or what is the source?
• Has the information been confirmed or verified by more than one independent source?
• What is the purpose of the information and/or those disseminating it?
• Does the communication tell the whole story or does it leave out key information?
• Is the information one-sided or does it include multiple perspectives?
It is typically a form of strategic manipulation by selfish and even sinister people exploiting others for their own goals, such as undermining the foundations of democracy or threatening individual well-being, or even for the sheer pleasure of creating chaos. Often covert political propaganda, dark participation is rarely recognized as such; it bears no warning labels and is consumed indistinguishably along with legitimate information on popular online platforms. Some countries have developed regulations to limit exposure to dark information, but the United States is not one of them. Experts believe that dark participation is a major contributor to the shrill and often mean polarization that marks America and other democracies. It has grown in parallel to the recent wave of populism in Western democracies.
The term dark participation was coined in 2018 by communications researcher Thorsten Quandt of the University of Munster, Germany, to explain the failure of a selfless, democracy-furthering citizen-participation journalism to arise in the early 2000s, when computer use was rapidly adopted en masse. However utopian the expectation, the hope for democratic renewal through citizen engagement was nevertheless widespread at the time of the millennium. The term has since expanded to characterize the many instances of hate speech, incivility, fake news, and disinformation fomenting divisiveness and roiling democratic societies. Quandt calls dark participation “the evil flip side of citizen engagement.”
Dark participation currently takes several forms, and it is thought that new forms may evolve in the future. Thorsten Quandt and others single out hate speech, disinformation such as the strategic spread of false information, trolling and bullying to harass or discredit individuals, and spreading conspiracy theories.
It encompasses fake news, which is factually distorted information disguised as journalism or manufactured or manipulated images. Dark participation also includes incivility, including expressions of intolerance and the encouragement of violence.
One of the most noted purveyors of dark participation was the now-defunct Internet Research Agency, established in St. Petersburg, Russia, by Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2013 and known as a “troll farm.” Using fake accounts on established social media sites, the group not only supported Russia’s interests in Ukraine and Syria but issued messages to discredit Alexei Navalny in Russia and to discredit Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. elections. The group also engaged in messaging to polarize attitudes about vaccines. In 2018, the U.S. government indicted the agency for criminally interfering in the 2016 U.S. election.
Many are the motivations for dark participation. Sometimes dark participation is the result of situational rage. Other times it is more purposeful and the product of “authentic evil”—morally bad acts driven by personal hate or the sheer pleasure of making others suffer. Then there are large-scale manipulation campaigns with negative intent—by various interest groups or state actors—to undermine trust in public institutions, discredit public figures, foment societal discord, to influence the outcome of elections.
Dark personality traits such as Machiavellianism and sociopathy can drive the manipulativeness that underlies dark participation. Some may engage in negative behavior for the sheer joy of harming others. Many use online communication instrumentally, intentionally spewing disinformation to sow doubt about events in democracies. But not all forms of negative online behavior are the result of dark personalities. Some actors may spew hate or humiliation in response to perceived slights by others.
A primary consequence of dark participation is polarization leading to widespread distrust of others, social discord, and incivility. In some countries, dark participation has directly influenced public attitudes on important policy matters such as immigration and triggered criminal activity against refugees. Communications to deliberately foment polarization can divert populations from recognizing other important developments.
