I highly recommend the book Network Propaganda. I’ve written recently about institutions and technology, so wanted to highlight this bit from the end of that book:
Our study suggests that we should focus on the structural, not the novel; on the long-term dynamic between institutions, culture, and technology, not only the disruptive technological moment; and on the interaction between the different media and technologies that make up a society’s media ecosystem, not on a single medium, like the internet, much less a single platform like Facebook or Twitter. The stark differences we observe between the insular right-wing media ecosystem and the majority of the American media environment, and the ways in which open web publications, social media, television, and radio all interacted to produce these differences suggest that the narrower focus will lead to systematically erroneous predictions and diagnoses.
beyond the times 