On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy

by Lee McIntyre

The storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, was an American tragedy. It was also completely predictable. The “patriots” in face paint—who carried sharpened flagpoles, bats, and zip ties into the Senate chamber—were the inevitable result of seventy years of lies about tobacco, evolution, global warming, and vaccines. After the “truth killers” provided a blueprint for how to deny scientific facts that clashed with their financial or ideological interests, it was a small step for unscrupulous politicians to figure out how to use this strategy to lie about anything they wanted, such as the baseless claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that the January 6 insurrectionists were actually “peaceful protestors” or Antifa in disguise.

Welcome to the world of reality denial, where truth is subordinate to ideology, feelings have more weight than evidence, and democracy hangs in the balance.

The post-truth playbook goes like this: attack the truth tellers, lie about anything and everything, manufacture disinformation, encourage distrust and polarization, create confusion and cynicism, then claim that the truth is available only from the leader himself. The goal is not merely to get people to believe any particular false claim, but to so demoralize them with a tsunami of falsehoods that they begin to give up on the idea that truth can be known at all, outside a political context.

Timothy Snyder, put it even more succinctly: “post-truth is pre-fascism.”2

The truth isn’t dying—it’s being killed.

denialism is intended to benefit the people who create the lies, not the people who believe them.

One imagines some ambitious, orange-haired politician making the cynical leap of inference from cigarettes and global warming to other fact-based beliefs: “Why, if they can get away with lying about that, I can lie about anything at all.” And he did. The truth killers now had a new target: not just science, but reality itself.

MAGA is not just a political movement—it’s a good old-fashioned denialist campaign. Fifteen years ago, cognitive scientists discovered that all science deniers follow the same flawed reasoning strategy:1 (1) cherry-pick evidence (2) believe in conspiracy theories (3) engage in illogical reasoning (4) rely on fake experts (and denigrate real experts) (5) have impossible expectations for what the other side must achieve

the problem today is that this same toxic form of reasoning has now metastasized from science denial to reality denial—from claims that evil researchers are putting microchips into our vaccines, to claims that nefarious state election officials somehow rigged the 2020 presidential election and then destroyed all the evidence.

Denialist beliefs often elicit an incredulous response by those who do not share them, for they cannot understand how—even in the face of overwhelming refutatory evidence—a denier will refuse to give them up. Why does this happen? Because denialist beliefs are not based on facts in the first place; they are rooted in identity.

Even empirical beliefs are heavily influenced by community, trust, values, and how we see ourselves in relation to the people around us.

Who is more likely to get their genes into the next generation? The iconoclast who keeps insisting that they are right (even if they are) or the one who gets along better with others?

The goal of disinformation is not just to get you to question some particular fact about a piece of reality that clashes with the disinformer’s interests, but to erode your trust in the “truth tellers” on the other side. This undercuts the basis for a whole class of factual beliefs all at once. The genius of disinformation is that it doesn’t just get you to believe a falsehood, but to distrust (and sometimes even hate) anyone who does not also believe this same falsehood.

Don’t just lie, polarize. Create a news silo. Exploit any preexisting grievance and resentment. Make it “us against them.” The other side is not just biased, they are lying to you. These are evil people. Perhaps they even deserve to be physically assaulted or thrown in jail.

As long as the narrative appeals to the emotions of what your team wants to believe—and they have been conditioned to think that it is what a loyal team member is supposed to think—you can get them to assert the truth of almost anything. This is why distrust, and not just doubt, is the prime objective of a denialist campaign. Mere doubt can be overcome with evidence, but distrust cannot.

today’s conspiracy-fueled dumpster fire of disbelief about any facts that conflict with one’s political agenda. This is no longer just about science, but reality itself. And it is no longer motivated solely by money, but ideology and power.

Denialism has now become a political litmus test for the Republican Party. And its highest expression is MAGA.

the insurrectionists were not able to get their hands on Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi, and there was no coup. Yet in another sense, #StopTheSteal has been a ringing success . . . and it is far from over. Sixty-six percent of Republican voters still think the 2020 election was stolen, and that Trump is the rightful president.14 A stunning 147 Republican members of Congress still refuse to publicly acknowledge that Joe Biden is the legitimately elected president of the United States.15 Why do they believe these things? Because Donald Trump wants them to.

#StopTheSteal is not merely an attempt to overturn the last election—it is a propagandistic effort meant to undermine voters’ confidence that there is such a thing as a fair election, so that Trump can steal the next one.

In the following months, as Trump’s propaganda campaign settled over the United States, it achieved its intended purpose. We were confused and disoriented. Few understood what had hit us. Why was Trump lying so much? Had the man no shame? Some of the lies were even about things that were easily refuted by evidence. But why, then, did so many people seem to believe him? Trump was dismissed as a fool by many, but he had mastered something no one else had ever succeeded in: the application of Russian-inspired disinformation tactics to US politics.17

As Bannon so memorably put it, “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”19 Even if the truth tellers found the holy grail, would anyone recognize it?

the overall goal is not simply to persuade but to so confuse and disorient your opponent that they become cynical and break into different camps over how to respond.

first reported in the Wall Street Journal, which explained that Russian intelligence had been deliberately creating and pushing anti-Western vaccine stories through four of its English-language propaganda arms.30 In April 2020, for instance, the Oriental Review published a story claiming that any forthcoming Western vaccines were likely to contain biometric microchips, courtesy of Bill Gates, who had allegedly taken out patent number 060606 on this technology.31 Near the bottom of the article were buttons to make it easier for readers to share this story on Facebook and Twitter, which they did. Only a month later, CBS News reported on a poll that found that 44 percent of Republicans thought that the microchip story was true.32

more plausible answer for who is responsible for America’s recent slippage into reality-denying crazy town is staring us right in the face: it’s Trump.

one of the most amazing things about Trump’s disinformation campaign is that he has used it not only against millions of US voters but hundreds if not thousands of government officials as well. Even as the twice-impeached, single-term, biggest loser in the modern history of US politics,37 Trump still controls the agenda of the Republican Party and has managed to convince a majority of them that the best way to win a future election is not to appeal to voters but to change the election laws (and gum up the works of the January 6 investigation), so that maybe next time he won’t need an insurrection to cement his grasp on power.

179 of those 291 deniers won their races, including 175 in the US House, which represents an increase in the 139 Republicans who voted against the electoral college count immediately following the January 6 assault on the US Capitol.39 The fact that over sixty courts have dismissed Trump’s claims of election fraud and irregularities as meritless does not seem to matter to these sorts of true believers. Trump’s big lie is the gift that keeps on giving, not just for Trump but for all Republicans, for it serves as justification for a power grab that could portend the end of American democracy.

2020 election deniers’ election performance in the 2022 elections.

somewhere that ultimate truth killer Vladimir Putin must be smiling. In a 2021 article in Foreign Affairs entitled “The Kremlin’s Strange Victory,” Fiona Hill argues that this would be the ultimate triumph for Russia.40 Not just when we leave them alone, but when we become just like them.

According to a 2021 study put out by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, 65 percent of the anti-vax propaganda on Twitter was due to just twelve people.1 In an internal study, Facebook found that 111 of their accounts were spreading half of all the anti-vaccine disinformation on their site.2

The “Fox News Effect” was discovered in 2012, when academic researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University found that regular viewers of Fox’s highly partisan, selectively biased “news” coverage were less well informed than if they had watched no news at all.4

2020 Pew Research study, it was found that 65 percent of Republicans named Fox News as their most trusted news site; in comparison to Democrats, they also named vastly fewer other news sites that they trusted at all.5

in recent years, Fox has begun to report stories that come straight out of Russian-government funded news sources such as RT (Russia Today), which are little more than state-controlled propaganda.

In his book Hoax, journalist Brian Stelter tells the story of how a 2016 Russian-manufactured conspiracy theory—regarding the murder of Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Rich—found its way onto the popular morning show Fox and Friends because (as a Fox News employee later revealed in a lawsuit) it “advanced President Trump’s agenda.”6 This is not to mention Sean Hannity and other Fox hosts’ extensive coverage of WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign, which is now known to have been the result of a Russian influence operation.7 Or the more recent shilling that Tucker Carlson—Fox’s most popular media host—has been doing for Vladimir Putin’s propaganda efforts in support of his war against Ukraine.8 Alarmingly, Carlson’s program is sometimes rebroadcast to an appreciative Russian audience on Kremlin state-sponsored television.9

In an interview for the documentary film Broken Media, Chris Hayes—one of the prime-time anchors on MSNBC—admitted that even the most well-intentioned networks and journalists inevitably butt up against the problem of “confirmation bias”: Every media outlet constructs narratives. . . . The problem is when you subvert the complexity and the facts to the dominant story you’re telling. That’s a real danger and it happens all the time—when relevant facts are left out because they don’t fit the narrative thrust of the story you’re trying to tell.13

The foremost imperative of a news outlet should be to tell the truth. At times, of course, this ideal conflicts with an individual reporter’s desire not to be accused of political favoritism. If the truth falls mostly on one side of the partisan divide, might this not suggest to a polarized audience that the person who reports it is not being objective? One handy solution is to indulge the reflex to “tell both sides of the story.” Yet in an environment rife with disinformation, this is the worst possible way to report on a factual matter, because it not only gives oxygen to a lie but might tacitly suggest that the truth lies somewhere in between.

Fortunately, this point is occasionally made by journalism professors who shape the next generation of reporters. In one scalding example attributed to Jonathan Foster, a lecturer in journalism at the University of Sheffield, one student remembers him saying: “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the fucking window and find out which is true.”14

Mainstream media can be truth killers too—or at least bystanders who refuse to render aid when the truth is dying.

In his important essay “How Media Coverage Drove Biden’s Political Plunge,” Perry Bacon Jr. has argued that after so many years of (justifiably) negative coverage of Trump, many in the media were desperate to find a big anti-Biden story that might inoculate them against accusations of left-wing bias.20 And they found it in Biden’s somewhat chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. This kind of performative objectivity, where journalists search for negativity anywhere they can find it and exaggerate what little they can find, had the truth-twisting effect of making it seem as if Biden’s transgressions were somehow equal to Trump’s.

why these companies do not do more to combat misinformation and disinformation on other topics all the time.24 Of course, tech executives can be expected to bristle at this characterization, preferring to highlight the number of accounts they have closed and the number of messages they have taken down. But this always reminds me a bit of the “greenwashing” advertisements one sees from ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies talking about their efforts to research algae and other alternative fuels, even though this accounts for less than 1 percent of their annual research budget.25 Companies often report the top line number, but where is the denominator?

Facebook, YouTube, & X (neé Twitter).

In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg said it was “crazy” to think that misinformation on Facebook might have helped Trump win the presidential election. By 2017, he admitted that more than 150 million people had viewed Russian propaganda posts before the election.27

Despite Zuckerberg’s 2021 statement that Facebook has spent $13 billion on “safety and security” since 2016—and that it has a human team of 40,000 scrubbing for misinformation—this pales in comparison to the scope of the problem and the potentially horrible consequences for American democracy if they do not get this right.29

Could Facebook and other tech companies do more to fight disinformation on their platforms? Of course, if they cared to. How do we know this? Because they already do it for other odious content. Ask yourself this: when was the last time you saw pornography, suicide, beheadings, or other acts of terrorism on Facebook? The answer is likely never. That’s because Facebook employs a human team that scrubs for this type of content, so it never makes its way onto our news feeds. It’s got to be the worst job at Facebook, but they care enough to pay attention to it, because it would likely hurt their bottom line if they did not.30 So couldn’t they do the same for disinformation? Yes, if they cared enough.

2021 Wall Street Journal series called “The Facebook Files,” which was facilitated by leaked documents from whistleblower and forme...

In Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang’s 2021 book An Ugly Truth, they detail how profit-driven decisions by top Facebook executives have facilitated and enabled a cover-up of the company’s harms in the interest of making a buck, even at the cost of promoting hate speech, lies, and disinformation.32

Facebook knows that its focus on engagement leads to hatred, polarization, and the potential for violence. That’s why it tweaked its algorithm just before the 2020 presidential election, hoping not to repeat the debacle of fake news that spread on its platform in the run-up to the 2016 election. But they then turned the dials back immediately after the 2020 election—and the result was January 6.33

disinformation is no less benign because it is shared by useful idiots rather than Russian bots.

Social media companies’ efforts so far have been woefully inadequate, not because they don’t know what to do, but because there has so far been little incentive for them to do it. With no sustained external pressure, most tech companies will likely continue to fail to act in proportion to the seriousness of the problem. To stop the truth killers from succeeding, we must get more serious about fighting the amplification of misinformation and disinformation, and for that we need to create more reason for both partisan and social media outlets to curb the role that they play in propagating polluted content.

After the Fairness Doctrine was repealed, one of the most popular radio shows to enjoy its new freedom was Rush Limbaugh in 1988. This opened the floodgates for the first broadcast of Fox News on television in 1996, and all that followed.

in 2008 even President Obama felt that, instead of this, it was more important to focus on “opening up the airwaves and modern communications to as many diverse viewpoints as possible.”40 In a free market of ideas, wouldn’t the truth win out? Actually, no. More speech across diverse outlets does not balance out disinformation, because if no individual network has to be “fair,” this incentivizes news siloes that are devoted to skewed content, which is sometimes all that anyone watches.

A second idea might be to revise Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives immunity to website platforms for any liability damages that may arise from third-party content on their pages.

In their defense, Facebook, Twitter, and the like tend to say that they are “news aggregators, not publishers,” despite the fact that over 70 percent of Americans today get their news from social media platforms.42