Endorsing easily disproven claims linked to prioritizing symbolic strength
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
A quick web search on fake news and tribalism reveals these earlier articles:
2017: https://fortune.com/2017/01/13/fake-news-tribalism/
2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/upshot/the-real-story-abo...
2023: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-xge0001374.pd...
That's only a small part of what the article says.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45618020
> Claims of strength vs weakness are directly analogous to professing in-group allegiance.
They are mostly orthogonal imho. I can be strong without being in-group, and vice versa. In a group whose ideology is worship of power, then I can see a relationship but they aren't at all the same. For example, there are those who take the role of the weak who are worshipping power (and sometimes wanting it) and a defined power structure, like people who identify with being 'betas' and incels.
The article is not talking about signalling/declaring tribal allegiance. The article is saying that people support lies because they see the public argument as an informational battlespace that their side needs to be victorious over, and the truth is irrelevant. Endorsing lies is a necessary evil to prevent your side from losing ground.
There's an explicit tribalistic term in your explanation for why this is not about tribalism.
There's an entirely logical reason why authoritarians undermine truth and truth-generating social systems.
The #1 goal of an authoritarian leader is to acquire maximum concentrated power relative to other people. Everything else is secondary.
One of the main ways someone's power can be undermined is by many people combining their small individual powers into a single coherent group. But that requires coordination and agreement. Everyone has to row the boat in the same direction for it to work.
Reality has a natural coordinating effect since we all share the same material universe. Thus, the more people are grounded in reality, the easier it is for them to agree and coordinate. They have a larger set of facts which they already naturally agree on.
Therefore, to undermine that coordination, every authoritarian regime in history has sought to undermine institutions and people that aim to discover and disseminate facts about reality.
Being an edgelord who repeats known falsehoods plays into that. It's effectively throwing up flak into the information sphere to obscure facts that might otherwise disseminate.
Authoritarianism has a lot of obvious appeal for the authority, but what is in it for the bootlickers? The answer isn't clear, but I think it mostly rests on a sense that it feels safest/strongest to be a member of the tribe whose alpha is the biggest baddest gorilla. People that support an authoritarian leader often believe that the leader will protect them and be on their side.
Of course, anyone who knows even a bit of history of authoritarianism knows that Dear Leader will happily kick people out at the slightest provocation and seems to always need his subjects to make sacrifices he himself never seems to have to make. But there is always no shortage of suckers who just want to feel like they're on a winning team.
If you decided that a hallmark of your tribe is brushing your teeth, then when you see someone brushing their teeth you still can't really tell if they're in your tribe or not.
The best signals have either neutral or negative intrinsic value because the more costly the signal is, the more likely someone doing it values the signal.
The actual study is paywalled and not present on Sci-Hub, but I wonder what were all the questions, whether they tried it the other way around (with true claims, perhaps on some other topic), how different the answers were with those. I would guess it is implied, to support such an interpretation, but it is not stated explicitly, and from what is written, it sounds like people who believed in conspiracy theories (or were otherwise skeptical of mainstream views) were in fact unhappy to go along with prevention measures and annoyed by the mainstream coverage, which is not surprising at all.
> When people think symbolically this way, the literal issue – here, fighting COVID-19 – is secondary to a psychological war over people’s minds. In the minds of those who think they’re engaged in them, psychological wars are waged over opinions and attitudes, and are won via control of belief and messaging.
> people who responded positively to these statements would feel they “win” by endorsing misinformation – doing so can show “the enemy” that it will not gain any ground over people’s views.
> vaccination, masking or other COVID-19 prevention efforts could be seen as a symbolic risk that could “weaken” one psychologically even if they provide literal physical benefits.
> The more outlandish or easily disproved something is, the more powerful one might seem when standing by it. Being an edgelord – a contrarian online provocateur – or outright lying can, in their own odd way, appear “authentic.”
> this mindset was also strongly associated with authoritarian attitudes, including beliefs that some groups should dominate others and support for autocratic government. These links help explain why strongman leaders often use misinformation symbolically to impress and control a population.
> they want those far-fetched claims acted on anyway. The deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, for example, can be the desired end goal, even if the offered justification is a transparent farce.
> debunkers merely demonstrate that they’re the ones reacting, and are therefore weak.
Another way to describe it, I think, is that some people use words as weapons, not as a means of transmitting knowledge.
So many people - even sophisticated leaders - opposed to disinformation don't understand that, and keep debunking and arguing, demonstrating with everything they say that they are losing a fight they don't even understand.
1) They believe it is true. 2) They want to believe it is true. 3) They want _you_ to believe it is true. 4) They want you to believe that _they_ believe it is true.
Not all of those things may be true and in most cases they are not.
Just take the simple statement: "God exists." and consider all the many possible motivations for people saying that.
The article describes research into some of those reasons.
This is a dubious example to give. Even NPR (which skews liberal) has given a much more nuanced[1] interpretation of the numbers. Obviously Trump's claim is hyperbolic and inflammatory (per his MO), but the sentiment does seem to resonate with at least some folks in DC, particularly ones that moved there in the early 2010s (when crime was at an all-time low).
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/08/19/nx-s1-5506208/dc-crime-trump-...
https://counciloncj.org/less-frequent-more-deadly/?fbclid=Iw...
> In a sample of 17 large American cities, the lethality of violent offenses increased 31% from 2019 to 2020 and was 20% higher in 2024 than in 2018. Thirteen of the 17 cities had higher lethality levels in 2024 than in 2018.
That pattern will be true in nearly every city you look at. We are not at all time highs or even close in most cities.
Or, ya know, maybe a rise in the lethality of crime in a society already one of the most profoundly violent in the world has too little hyperbole associated with it.
But when Greta Thunbery uses hyperbole that's politcal rallying to a cause and colition building for a serious threat. But when trump mobilizes resources for police funding in cities with absurd levels of violence, now anyone who endorses this must be really an authoritarian dupe who delights in being mislead.
When Greta lies it's a lie. When Trump lies it's a lie.
Emotional valence is communicated at a literal level in hyperbole. "You're the best mum in the world" isnt misinformation
To use the original article's language, the sentence "you're the best mum in the world" and "you're an exemplary mother because you take care of your children's emotional and material needs" are symbolically equivalent, even though the former is clearly a hyperbole.
Is a very different claim from
“Crime is at the highest level it’s ever been”
People believed a bunch of nonsense because people in authority were knowingly lying to them and intentionally confusing the facts at every turn. Normal people have no expertise, so they need to trust someone, and the people who were appointed to those positions of trust showed themselves willing to lie to help their own finances and careers, and to push transient political agendas.
They were left to trust other random people, like their religious leaders, or their family members - anybody who seemed like they had any moral grounding or conscience at all. They also trusted people who also pointed out that official institutional figures were lying - which is a mistake. It's easy for a scammer to point out another scammer, that doesn't mean you should trust him.
All the 5G conspiracy theories are just a reaction to how aggressively and undemocratically 5G was pushed. People intelligently and reasonably assume that if you are willing to run over everybody to do something from which there are enormous amounts of money to be made, you might not give two shits about any health consequences. This is also true, and they are right, but it doesn't mean that there are health consequences, which is the mistake.
But you know everything would have happened the same way if 5G were going to end up doubling the cancer rate or autism, or whatever other bad thing. We just wouldn't hear about it for 50 years, the people who got rich from it would have died of old age surrounded by their fat happy grandchildren, and their silver-spoon kids (your bosses) would be the ones in charge of the investigations and the remedies.
What about the research they did, including surveying 5,535 people across eight countries?
What science are your claims based on?
> stupid
Why is it so important for you to bring them down?
The size of the study is irrelevant if we can’t verify the methodology, and of course those details, if they were published at all, are behind the paywall.
They link to the study. These critcisms are a little hard to fathom as information: Is it symbolism of something, the same thing they describe?
Yeah—you see, if you click on that link you’ve identified, you’ll find the study itself is paywalled.
[edit: removed mistaken quotes of and references to another commenter; sorry]
EDIT: You are quoting an entirely different user, I never said it wasn’t science. THAT WAS SOMEONE ELSE.
Here everything can be explained by lines of trust, and resilience to information from low-trust sources.
Indeed, it's highly rational to highly doubt sources you do not trust, because you are almost never in a position to validation information.
Either way, the explanations they choose lead to a clearly partisan political narrative, way outside of the scope of their survey studies, that science washes attacks on trump and his supporters.
It is a technical decision. We make the democratic decision to have organizations like the FCC to hold the technical expertise to evaluate whether something like 5G is a good idea. Deciding democratically as a country that we want to defer some questions to experts is a fine thing to do.
I haven’t seen any actual professional RF engineers worried about 5G. From my mostly lay point of view: these are not scary frequencies.
What the hell does this even mean? Are we upset that carriers and handset manufacturers adopting 5G wasn't put up for a vote? Did adoption of 5G cause some great harm to people?
They did not study trump, trump supporters, trump's political project, its motivations, their motivations, authoritarianism, etc. All of that analysis in this article is partisan politics with sciecne-washing.
By wading into contemporary politics and attributing "authoritarian" psychology to people who want to believe, e.g., what trump says -- you're only making a partisan political statement. This hypothesis is one amongst an infinite number, and has nothing to do with their study.
"Oh but it feels true!" is exactly the opposite of science. They did not study Trump, nor his political strategies, not their supposed underlying psychological motivations.
One can find in every government in the world so-called "misinformation", and find in people who support those governments, credulity about this misinformation. They havent studied any of the relevant domains to make any of these partisan political claims, even if they are true.
By wading into contemporary politics, they are giving the veener of science to highly partisan claims about the supposed psychology of political actors. That isnt what they have studied.
> "Oh but it feels true!"
Where is that said or implied? They did research and described it.
> attributing "authoritarian" psychology to people who want to believe, e.g., what trump says -- you're only making a partisan political statement. This hypothesis is one amongst an infinite number, and has nothing to do with their study.
They did indeed study that and discussed the research. We need to study partisan behavior without being dismissed as partisan ourselves - otherwise, we just operate in the dark, shut down by partisan attacks.
> One can find in every government in the world so-called "misinformation", and find in people who support those governments, credulity about this misinformation.
There is precipitation everywhere, but some places are deserts and some are rainforests and there is everything in between, and there are many patterns and causes, from monsoons to mist from SF Bay. To dismiss all precipitation research because 'rain is everywhere' is meaningless.
You're making many claims, but have nothing to back it up.
> They did not study Trump, nor his political strategies
They didn't talk about Trump.
They literally did. You're not completely wrong about GP's other silliness, but Trump is specifically named toward the end of the article.