People are saying that “Democracy is on the ballot” for this U.S. election — and I agree — but even more basic than that, in this election Americans are voting for nothing less than truth itself.
Yes, one of the candidates has made over 20,000 false or misleading claims at an increasing rate since the last presidential election, but that’s only one facet of this. Truth is not quite as simple as just being being right or accurate. A number of different categories are arrayed in opposition to truth, including misinformation, falsehood, inaccuracy and disinformation. And, cutting across those is the confusing vehicle of “lies” in which these categories travel.
Being truthful is a virtue. Being a person of integrity, having high fidelity between what’s in your mind and what you say out loud is valued in most philosophical and religious traditions. Even in a political context telling the truth is supposed to be a value because lies will be found out and you will be mistrusted and pushed out.
At the heart of the idea of “truth” in a democratic context, though, is the imperative that the people know the facts so they can govern their politicians. This is why freedom of information is enshrined along with freedom of assembly in the United States’ First Amendment. Instruments of discovery and dissemination are inviolate because they are the means through which the demos (the people) knows how kratos (power) is being used — or flouted — and by whom.
This Amendment is important because the important truths may be deeply inconvenient to people in power. Richard Nixon was not a fan of Watergate reporting, nor the Catholic Church of Spotlight but the Amendment severely curtails their ability to stop the publication of these truths. Of course, though, once you protect inconvenient truths, you are in danger of protecting scurrilous truths, scurrilous lies and tales of Elvis being alive and rocking Mars.
So if a group of people, motivated by some common impulse that would be adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community, they would have to make sure that their motivations and actions were not scrutinized. This has been the case for decades as business and political factions in North America have blocked measures to improve education, health and climate regulation.
They do not seek to prevent publication, they seek to muddy the waters of truth with falsehoods (e.g. “climate change is not manmade”), misrepresentations (e.g. “scientists disagree”), disinformation (e.g. deliberately bad studies spread maliciously or good ones withheld), misinformation (wrong facts innocently purveyed for example by unwitting reporters or, now, influencers “new study shows burning wood is good for the environment”) and more. Each of these tactics takes up our time, our attention and our credibility.
Once phones became powerful enough to provide personalized media and social media all these campaigns could share the same methods. Encouraged by the virulence, successful trolling and divisiveness of Gamergate in 2014 and with social media owners evincing a total lack of interest in either discouraging lies and hate or enforcing their standards, domestic and foreign groups stepped up a series of campaigns intended to undermine truth across the world. The more we trust them, the more we lose, the less we trust everything the more we lose.
In this U.S. election one candidate is committed to online hate, bullying and disinformation. That candidate and his campaign are, as Nate Silver and crew on the 538 podcast put it, “menacing, gaslighting, anti-democratic” on national television less than 48 hours from the election. If that candidate is voted in, the deterioration of the civic scene that we’ve seen in the last 6 years will get catastrophically worse in the next 4 years.
Here are the 5 ways in which the campaign works to undermine truth and public information.
1. Undermine the Press : Be the Change You Want to See in the World
Until the advent of social media, the aggregated discovery and dissemination project was known as “the press,” as Thomas Jefferson put it:
“No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press.”
Obviously some press outlets are not centrally committed to truth and those that are sometimes get things wrong the first time around. News organizations are, as Michael Goldfarb’s excellent podcast reminds us, just the first rough draft of history. But from the moment that Roger Ailes took over Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News there was a major television outlet committed to undermining truth in news in the United States. Since then Sinclair News have bought up many local stations and taken up the mantle of disinformation. In the U.K., the current attack on the BBC under the guise of “woke culture gone mad,” is the latest Murdoch attempt to undermine competition and to marginalize fact-based reporting.
Print newspapers are expensive to set up and difficult to replicate, but the business model is fraught with problems in a digital age when Google and Facebook have stolen content and ad revenue. Setting up news websites is relatively fast and cheap — even more so if you don’t investigate the news or check the facts. Ideological “news” websites have proliferated to look like reputable outlets which is a win-win for the enemies of truth. Either their untrue ideological statements are believed or they are recognised as lies and their untruths tar all news websites.
2. Undermine the Press : Call Them liars
The New York Times recently published an astonishing graphic of some ongoing lies from the president. After literally tens of thousands of lies in his first four years, 90 minutes in Wisconsin saw another 131 “false or inaccurate statements”
In his rallies the current president routinely lies in a way that is a projection of how he sees political lies but is actually not how political lies work
For someone who lies more often than I speak to label reputable fact-checking news outlets as “fake news” is the worst possible case of the pot calling the kettle black.
3. Misinformation and Disinformation — Wrong Things That Get Told Innocently or Deliberately
a. Truth by Flickering Gas Light
Gaslighting is a tactic in which a person or entity, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality. The most basic form of this is to accuse the victim of doing exactly what you are intending to do. Whether that’s fix elections, rig the courts, disenfranchise voters, ruin the economy, lie blatantly to your employer, whatever it takes. This means that when the truth is leveled at you, it looks like a lame repetition of your initial accusation.
b. Don’t Look at That, Look at This Shiny New Thing!
There are different paces at which human attention absorbs and processes information. Typically we absorb things that are immediate and familiar to us quickly. Things that are large, or at one remove, take longer. So, aspects of national policy or behaviour where national political figures routinely act against the interest of their office, act to injure their employers or mis-use funds in novel ways can take a while to register. And, even if they register, they can be easily forgotten or dismissed.
You know about Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow” — well if you can keep a fast-moving, attention-grabbing catastrophe with multiple forms of destruction at the centre of public attention you can keep everyone in the thinking fast mode. Non-absorbent, nothing-to-see-here mode.
c. Psst, Your Neighbour Hates You
Social media in its current form allows micro-targeting. That means, unlike pamphleteers who could be as mean and racist as anyone, anyone can maliciously whisper lies to a group about another group without that first group knowing about it. So I could target English speakers in a Hispanic area and feed them “Mexican Rapist” stories that are dignified with genuine, but bogus certificates. And, at the same time, I could target the Spanish speakers with an “all white people are racists and trying to deport you” article.
These articles I’ve linked to in the paragraph above, by the way, are reputable — it doesn’t take much to twist the lede with an introductory paragraph and push them out maliciously. The wave of misinformation works mostly by erosion, not tsunami. Also, of course, if you set neighbour against neighbour, it is a lot easier to oppose either group politically.
4. Why Opposition Supporters Appear So Stupid
I quoted Jefferson earlier from an essay by Arthur Milikh for National Affairs. I used Milikh because the analysis of the landscape that I’m sharing is not liberal or progressive or leftist. His article, written for one extreme conservative periodical (National Affairs) and specifically chosen by another (The Heritage Foundation) to present to the public, outlines the exact problem of algorithmic bubbles.
With the help of new media technologies, the oppositional press has ushered into existence the parallel universes that American citizens now construct for themselves by choosing which press better flatters their prejudices. Alarmingly, citizens who inhabit each of these monolithic realities are more than merely at partisan ends of a political spectrum — they have become to some degree almost different kinds of beings, given the extent of their differences in sentiments, passions, habits of character, and tastes. Indeed, the new multiplicity of news sources, despite some obviously healthy effects, can create a greater and greater cacophony of similar sentiments while reducing genuine thoughtfulness. This need not, however, be our nation's final situation.
Opposition supporters appear stupid because they occupy a different reality. Conservatives have constructed a bubble that is growing and, with the help of social media, almost seamless. People inside the bubble tend to consume less variety of news sources and the news sources tend to be founded ideologically.
The COVID virus is the most massive manifestation of why this matters. Denying the existence of a deadly contagious disease, denying the science about how to prevent it and denying government responsibility to act simply don’t help. As Mother Jones magazine has said: “The virus doesn’t care.” Failing to act on facts is not just a question of bias, it is fatal. It may prove fatal to the ideological news bubble that Jon Stewart famously called “bullshit mountain” or it just may prove fatal to another 300,000 Americans.
5. Thinking Slow: The Rise of QAnon and More
The militia Facebook groups, the YouTube channels of hate, the Twitter bots and bullies all pale into insignificance next to the slow ooze of lies into people’s minds. In the recent Borat film, the title character stays with two hospitable westerners. They believe that Bill and Hillary Clinton, not to mention other democrats and the media, are “evil politicians who torture children by raising their adrenaline and then consuming their blood.”
Media watchdog groups like Media Matters believe that there could be as many as 30 million Americans who believe in this or the even more kooky version of the QAnon insanity — that “Democrats, the media, and parts of the government are operating together in cahoots to take down Donald Trump. And that the reason they want to take down Donald Trump is because he is the only person that is trying to stop their child sex trafficking ring. And the reason why they run this child sex trafficking ring, according to these believers, is that they're either sadists, psychic vampires, or interdimensional demons.”
Once you have a significant population that is essentially indoctrinated in a cult, there’s little useful information you can ever give them. Once people believe such bizarre counterfactual assertions, they are not only beyond help, they are actually in position to be super spreaders of misinformation.
But, let’s say there are 15 million QAnon believers — and that’s a low estimate — how many people are there who believe in a worldview that incorporates some of their misinformation? That the Earth is flat? That politicians are running pedophilia rings? That there’s a “Deep State” out to get Trump? That the Democrats are actively working to hurt Americans? (See 3a above). That Jews control the media? That vaccinations are harmful?
What Next?
Whoever wins this election, we have a fight for truth on our hands: battleground the cloud, the courts, the schools. I hate the metaphor of war, but it’s difficult not to see this as a struggle against a faction deeply disinterested in human wellbeing. If truth loses the election we may be fighting a losing guerilla war for a generation.
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