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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Lee McIntyre
Read between
January 6 - January 14, 2024
Behavioral economists have shown that if you provide nudges and incentives for people to change their individual behavior, they often will. The same might presumably work for companies; if they could get sued for sharing disinformation—as other publishers can—just watch it dry up.
A third possibility, which the social media companies could implement even without any legal or regulatory incentive, would be to get more aggressive about policing not just false content but the known individuals who are most active in amplifying it. In a recent interview, Clint Watts—a counterterrorism expert, FBI analyst, and former member of the Joint Terrorism Task Force—recommended that the number one way to fight disinformation was to “focus on the top 1 percent of disinformation peddlers, rather than trying to police all false content. If you know who they are, removing the worst
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Note that election disinformation dropped 73 percent just a week after Twitter and a few other platforms cut off Trump!46
A fourth and final strategy might be to focus more attention not just on the behavior of the big three social media platforms—Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—but also on the stack of other companies that run the Internet, without which the giant user platforms could not run their businesses.
“gatekeepers”—the webhosts, web traffic controllers, content delivery networks, and financial service providers (Amazon Web Services, Apple’s App Store, GoDaddy, WordPress, Akamai, PayPal, Venmo, and the like)—without whom the big three platforms would be powerless?
the First Amendment protects against government censorship of individual speech, not private companies, who can deplatform anyone they like. But such hesitation is also ridiculous because it makes it sound as if—in order not to interfere with free speech—we are required to do everything we can to give an immediate, free, and powerful platform to known liars.
Although it may sound cheering and patriotic, it is not necessarily true that the best solution to “bad speech” is “more speech,” on the theory that truth would inevitably win out over lies. Recent empirical research has shown that, at least with scientific disinformation, lies are quite salient, and once an audience hears disinformation, a predictable percentage will simply believe it no matter what correcting information might later be offered.51 Although there are steps one can take to mitigate this effect, we cannot debunk our way out of an infodemic. One doesn’t fix a polluted information
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One of the most intriguing ideas to fight the amplification of disinformation on the Internet is to make social media algorithms available to academic researchers. In keeping with a recent proposal put forward by cognitive scientist Stephan Lewandowsky, why not let cognitive scientists and others study Facebook’s and Twitter’s algorithms to give a more independent assessment of their potential for public harm?52
what is the incentive for social media companies to implement the simplest suggestion of all—tell the truth?
Right now, so far as we understand it, the social media algorithms are tweaked to promote “engagement,” which has the side effect of giving a strategic advantage to disinformers. But what if they were reprogrammed to lead people toward better, more reliable information that is also available on the same platform?
Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat and head of the Senate committee that sponsored the hearing, said that “there’s nothing inherently wrong” with how Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube use their algorithms for the purpose of user engagement, and made it clear that Congress was not weighing any legislation at this point.57 Contrast this with the apocalyptic stakes described by the experts who testified at the panel. In her testimony, Joan Donovan put it this way: “The biggest problem facing our nation is misinformation-at-scale. . . . The cost of doing nothing is democracy’s end.”58
given the fact that the human brain is wired with well over a hundred known cognitive biases, a shocking number of people believe things that aren’t supported by the evidence.1
According to a widely cited 2014 study by J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood, 50 percent of Americans believe in at least one conspiracy theory:2 Nineteen percent believe that 9/11 was an inside job. Forty percent believe that the Federal Drug Administration is deliberately withholding a cure for cancer. Nineteen percent think that the Fed deliberately created the 2008 recession.
Today, the situation hasn’t gotten any better. Twenty-three percent still either strongly or somewhat believe that 9/11 was an inside job.4 Twenty-five percent believe that the coronavirus pandemic was planned.5 Fifteen percent believe in QAnon
let’s not forget the 32 percent of Americans who have fallen for Trump’s big lie that Joe Biden stole the 2020 presidential election.
One landmark 2019 study by Philipp Schmid and Cornelia Betsch offers a ray of hope, with the first empirical evidence to show that it is possible to convince a statistically significant number of science deniers to give up their mistaken beliefs.7
In my book How to Talk to a Science Denier, I explore not just the Schmid and Betsch study but also some other research that suggests that how you approach a denier can be just as important as what you say to them. Face-to-face conversation works best, because that is where trust can be built.
in virtually every account I have ever read of a denier who changed their mind, it always happened in the exact same way—through personal engagement with someone they already trusted or had grown to trust.
the conversation can’t just be about sharing facts. Jonathan Swift probably said it best: “You can’t reason someone out of something they didn’t reason themselves into in the first place.”
many beliefs—even empirical ones—are about more than just facts. They’re about values. They’re about what others in their community believe. Often the most important reason why a denier holds a denialist belief is because of how it makes them feel.
most denialism is actually about identity.
The point of propaganda is not just to get you to believe false information, but to feel that those on the “other side” are your enemy.
In “street epistemology,” “motivational interviewing,” and “active listening,” the efficacy of these same techniques has been proven time and again. But here we face the crucial question: are such grassroots tools any match for a coordinated campaign of disinformation? The problem is that even if it worked every time, the “talk to them” solution is not really “scalable.”
if I could guarantee to get one single message out to all of the science and reality deniers I’ve ever met, it would be this: “You have been lied to.” If the primary target of the truth killers is reality, their collateral victims are the believers, who are being duped. Good luck getting them to believe that. As Mark Twain is purported to have said, “It is easier to fool someone than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
In 2020, the US Army Cyber Institute announced that one of the most virulent threats to US security in coming years would be the problem of disinformation, which they explored in a new training manual entitled Invisible Force.
we need to increase the number of messengers for truth. We simply need more of them. The truth killers may not be many in number, but they have weaponized an army of believers through the amplification of disinformation. Who is out there on the side of truth to counter that on a day-to-day basis?
we should put more focus on matching the messengers for truth to the people we are trying to reach. Why not find influencers who have greater credibility within the community? “Target not only your message, but your messenger,”
A third piece of advice recommended by Watts was to “repeat the truth more often.”
an important part of this is finally to admit what we are up against and stop using euphemisms like “misinformation.” The disinformation crisis that is enabling the truth killers to do such violence to our society is not a mistake or even a crime. It is an act of war. And it is time we got on a war footing to fight it.
Barton Gellman’s January 2022 cover story in the Atlantic, “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun.”11 By hollowing out local election machinery, changing state laws, and making sure that all good Republicans in Congress continue to hew to his big lie, Trump is preparing the ground for what comes next. Fascism. Authoritarianism. Autocracy. What did you think this was about? Just one election? What is the point of killing truth and swapping in your own version of reality unless you want something enormous?
Even though Congress has now updated the Electoral Count Act of 1887, the possibility of a January 6 rerun is still out there.14 It’s right in the third paragraph of Article II, Section I of the US Constitution, which makes clear that in the event of a tie or other failure of one candidate to reach a majority in the electoral college—such as one state having a disputed set of electors—the choice of president will be thrown to the US House of Representatives, where there are no rules about whom they might choose, other than that the vote will be taken state by state, with each one having one
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History provides many examples to show that autocrats always go after the truth tellers first. By defending truth, you are thwarting their objective to control the narrative.
A third step that ordinary citizens might take to fight back against reality denial is to resist polarization. Even if you are on the virtuous side of facts and truth, fragmentation is dangerous. Remember that the goal of a disinformation campaign is not merely to get you to doubt, but also to distrust anyone on the other side. When you get to a point where you think of the people who disagree with you as your enemy, the autocrat’s work is easier.
Fourth, as hard as it is, recognize that in some sense deniers are victims. They have been duped.
Sixth, don’t fall for the sop that this can all be solved by “better education” or “critical thinking.” That is important, but it takes a while. And it is hard to get someone to think clearly when they are already in the grips of a conspiracy theory.
Read also the work of Masha Gessen. Nina Jankowicz. Laura Millar. Andy Norman. Peter Pomerantsev. Jonathan Rauch. Thomas Rid. Jen Senko. Jason Stanley. These are the authors who saw this coming. These are the authors who can inspire the actions that will save us.
We have been born into an age in which science and reason—indeed truth and reality itself—once again need defending. Embrace that. Don’t give in to despair. There is something you can do today to fight back against the truth killers.
