Lessons from the past on how to beat disinformation
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
But conspiratorial thinking originates in the gut--not the brain.
It's not a lack of education (or an excess of stupidity). We become conspiatorial when we feel powerless.
Whether that's about elections, or 9/11, or AIDS. And yes, i am susceptible to conspiracy too, and do are you.
The cure to conspiracy isn't facts, but empathy.
The election example is a bad one because it’s more about American’s being innumerate. They are incapable of understanding statistical data. E.g. https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat... (“In fact, 41% of Democrats replied that at least 50% of unvaccinated people have been hospitalized due to COVID-19.”).
When understanding “who won the 2020 election” requires understanding why Trump could have been ahead with 80% of the vote counted, but Biden pulled ahead overnight due to mail in votes and urban precincts, Americans are basically unable to understand that result. “Who won the election” is more a question about “who do you trust to report the election results to you?”
The approach suggested in the article is unlikely to address the real problem of lack of trust.
I don't think the article is advocating for Delmer's exact approach ("black propaganda"* in the 1950s parlance), but I find it reasonable that increasing people's agency might could get them to "do the research" and understand (didn't civics classes do this? do they still exist in the States?) how their own election systems work.
(I might even hope for understanding of the population structure and MSA breakdown of their own country, but let's not get greedy...)
* would you like to know more? see "source attribution" via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38294297
Americans have a wildly inaccurate understanding of who other Americans even are: https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/41556-americans-m.... For example, “Black Americans estimate that, on average, Black people make up 52% of the U.S. adult population.” Can you imagine the impact of that perception—that black people are a slight majority of the population when in fact they are 12%—on people's political beliefs and trust in the system?
I bet if you surveyed people who thought the 2020 election was stolen, they would vastly overestimate the percentage of the population that is rural white people. If you start from that premise, you start to understand how they could be astounded about the results of an election conducted under unfamiliar and quite different rules due to the pandemic.
But Trump's election-day lead in key swing states was not close. In Georgia, at 10:55 pm, Trump was ahead by 12 points and over 350,000 votes as of 11 pm ET with 72% of precincts reporting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp_drtD7cMc. As of the next morning, Trump was ahead in Pennsylvania by more than 10 points with 70% of the precincts counted. Then, over the coming days, Biden somehow pulled ahead--not just in one state, but in several.
If you go back to the dawn of cable news election coverage, I think you would be hard pressed to find an example where a candidate was behind 10-12 points on election night in key swing states but went on to win those states. My dad and I have been watching CNN election night coverage since the mid-1990s, and we both went to bed thinking that Trump had not only one, but had done so decisively.
The situation in 2020 was unique. If you had tasked state governments with coming up with an election process that would guarantee alarming late-breaking swings, you couldn't have done better than what Pennsylvania did. Because of COVID, mail-in ballots strongly correlated with party affiliation. Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania government set up ballot counting rules that ensured those ballots would be counted late. The state literally set up the conditions for one party's results to come in first, and in states like PA (and now GA and AZ) the margins are so thin that any structural effect like that is going to produce the same outcome.
You're going to say "well that's my point", but my argument is that 2020 is sui generis, and that states are going to do a bunch of things differently in 2024, beyond just the fact that Democrats are going to vote in person about the same as they did in 2016.
To your average person, the 2020 election results cannot be explained based on their past experience--which is the only way most people are capable of understanding anything. So what you believe about the results depends on who you trust. And lots of people don't trust Democrat-run counties to count votes correctly. They don't trust courts, who regularly do things like find new constitutional rights in a 235 year old document. Nor do they trust CNN anchors, who have dropped all pretenses about what they think about the "deplorables."
If Trump doesn’t become dictator it’ll be the next demagogue. It could be a much smarter, younger, slicker, and even more ruthless one. Or maybe things will just fall apart gradually until the union fragments.
Agreed — and each side thinks it has good reason not to trust the other. (One side is right about that.)
The problem really goes all the way back to Vietnam, Watergate, the credible suspicion around the JFK and MLK assassinations that was never addressed, etc. Things really started to go off the rails in the 1960s but it took until the 2000s for the bottom to fall out.
Trump is just an opportunistic grifter taking advantage of this.
Groups that diverge on fundamental values can’t trust each other. Historically, it just doesn’t work. When such divergences emerge around the world, they almost always result in political schisms.
In the U.S., we have a group (or collection of groups) that believes it has a divine mission to impose its fundamental values on everyone else, and that lying and cheating are justified in the service of that mission. Speaking for myself and a lot of others, that's a valid basis for us to mistrust that group.
But what valid basis does that group of zealots have for mistrusting the rest of us? One might reasonably suspect that it's merely that we won't knuckle under to how they think everyone should live their lives — in which case, why should we treat their ukases any differently than those of, say, Iranian ayatollahs?
There is no such thing as neutrality as to values, where "you do what you want and I do what I want." A society is a collective effort and necessarily reflects some set of values. A society built on individual choice and self-determination as core values ends up looking like San Francisco or New York City. You can't create Tokyo or Mayberry with those values. Government can't paper over differences in people's perception of what's a good life or what kind of society they want to live in, because ultimately it's the government's job to make those things happen.
And secularists are just as zealous about their core values as evangelical Christians are about theirs. Values that are important in the Muslim country where I come from, for example, are undermined every day in the secular blue state where I live.
> why should we treat their ukases any differently than those of, say, Iranian ayatollahs?
That is how you treat them, and you don't hide it well at all, and that's why they don't trust you.
Leaving aside that Mayberry is a fantasy, SF and NYC look pretty good compared to, say, Dhaka or Tehran, and they stack up reasonably well against Tokyo. Plus: You're focusing on a snapshot, when in fact it's a movie — I'd venture that the individualist-but-cooperative mindset is considerably more adaptive over the long term.
> Values that are important in the Muslim country where I come from, for example, are undermined every day in the secular blue state where I live.
So? The reverse is also true: Values that are important to people like me are undermined every day in that same country; does that mean we should change our values? Saying "yes, you should change your values because theirs are just better" is pretty presumptuous, no?
> That is how you treat them, and you don't hide it well at all, and that's why they don't trust you.
You haven't answered my question: Why should we privilege the dictates of "Christian" fundamentalists over those of Islamic fundamentalists — and why should we privilege either over our own values?
If Alice doesn't trust Bob merely because Bob insists on having his own values and prefers not to live according to Alice's, then that's Alice's problem — and if Alice tries to force Bob to adopt her values, then she should expect, let's just say, vigorous opposition.
I’d chose Salt Lake City (American Tehran)—and quite possibly real Tehran—over NYC and SF any day.
> Plus: You're focusing on a snapshot, when in fact it's a movie — I'd venture that the individualist-but-cooperative mindset is considerably more adaptive over the long term
In what respect? Economically? Possibly. But does it make people happier? The christian America I immigrated to seemed happier and more thriving than secular post-modern America I live in.
> You haven't answered my question: Why should we privilege the dictates of "Christian" fundamentalists over those of Islamic fundamentalists — and why should we privilege either over our own values?
My point is that you won’t. You’ll build a society that reflects your values—one that looks more like San Francisco than Salt Lake City. Your decisions on everything from welfare policy to education will reflect those values. And then those of us who would rather live in Salt Lake City will have to live in that society you’ve created. When I’m 55 and getting pictures of some dog instead of grandchildren, I’m not going to agree that your value neutrality allowed both of us to live in our preferred kind of society.
That is the root of the current lack of trust. You can share a government when you disagree about means. You can’t share a government when you disagree about ends. Reagan and Carter disagreed sharply about policy, but they basically subscribed to the same religion and shared an idea of what a good society looks like. That’s no longer true.
No you wouldn't.
That's the price you pay for living in a continental society where you're outvoted by people who (broadly) prefer SF and NYC to SLC.
BTW, unless SLC has changed bigly since the mid-1970s when I spent a few months in that region (and time off in SLC), I wouldn't characterize it as American Tehran.
Agreed that it's no longer true — now ask yourself why that is:
• Carter was always a pragmatic liberal, a civil-rights supporter in 1960s Georgia. If anything, as the years have gone on, he has become more Christian — in the original sense of "accept that you're not God, and seek the best for your neighbor as you do for yourself."
• Today's GOP would likely be unrecognizable to Reagan, and certainly to Eisenhower and Ford (and, perhaps, Nixon). Today, the folks running my former party regularly deride people like Mitt Romney, John Boener, and Paul Ryan as RINOs.
In the 1920s and 30s, the NSDAP wanted a particular type of society in Germany. They largely got their wish — with world-catastrophic results.