The American political bubbles are now made of steel; we share fake news that reinforces our beliefs, and reject realities that don’t conform with them. Is there any hope? We dive into the history of media technology for a glimmer of hope.
Let’s talk media technology – “How did we get here?”
That’s the big question Americans are asking themselves.
- Totally different narratives about reality
- Believe credible news that doesn’t agree with them is fake; and believe incredible news that agrees with them is real
Analysis
Republicans are definitely more likely to share fake news, and disbelieve credible news. Studies show this repeatedly, we have a few cited here. But the tendency tends to be only about 2:1, so ⅓ of all fake news is shared by liberals.
https://www.colorado.edu/today/2020/06/17/who-shares-most-fake-news-new-study-sheds-light
A good quote from a U Colorado researcher:
“Despite the fact that we tend to call it ‘fake’ news, a lot of this stuff is not completely false,” said Hopp, who prefers the term “countermedia.” “Rather, it is grossly biased, misleading and hyper-partisan, omitting important information.”
The more ideologically extreme or consistent you are (very liberal, very conservative), the more likely you are to share fake news. Makes sense: people far on one side or the other are very confident the world works exactly the way they think it does. They also tend to be older. We’ll come back to this.
Actual fake news from all sorts of non-credible media sites, I hypothesize, leads to this divergence of narrative.
The Hypothesis and some history
- Who gets fooled by nigerian princes? Aunt Judy. Not young people
- Same with the current Social Security phone scam
- WHY: it’s dressed in credible clothing: authority
- Similarly your forwards from gramma tend to be pictures with captions (the caption has nothing to do with the picture)
- Why does gramma fall for this? Gramma grew up in a world where pictures with captions were only in textbooks and newspapers–a credible format
- Gramma could trust the editorial boards of these to be fairly accurate that the picture represents something broader–not cherry-picked
- No longer! But the brain relies on these markings of credibility to find truth and doesn’t update!
- Young people are immune to this because they didn’t grow up learning to trust the picture-and-caption format, or trust that when someone says they’re an authority, that they are one (see: Nigerian Prince or Social Security scam)
- People can spoof identity easier than they used to, so it was a little easier to trust identity back then
- This has happened many times in the past:
- At the very beginning of the printing press
- Ticked off Italian merchant prints a pamphlet saying Jews were using Christian baby blood to perform satanic rituals
- Led to the slaughter of hundreds of Jews (Source: Tides of History Podcast)
- Because people had only seen written notices in their town from Churches and kings… something printed seemed credible
- The first newspapers were notoriously unreliable (Yellow Journalism) until people got so tired of it that newspapers with journalistic standards came to dominate the scene
- There are a good few studies which suggest conspiracy theories have arisen due to conspiracy theorists’ ability to make videos which look like documentaries: they get “experts” to speak, they use CGI for “analysis,” etc. We have come to trust documentaries, so if you make something look like a documentary, people are more likely to believe it. Youtube makes it easy to spread these, and so anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers are on the rise.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52588682
- At the very beginning of the printing press
https://www.wired.com/story/wired-guide-to-conspiracy-theories/
- What we’re seeing in social media is no different. Fake news websites look like real news websites. They have “citations” (usually other fake news websites). Social media channels which share these news stories will dress themselves up in cultural accrutements that look like they’re from your tribe: “Liberty Hangout” or such. Cartoons of the President hanging out with Jesus look like political cartoons from real newspapers. Etc.
- These all leave our minds vulnerable. If something feels credible and also has memetic power, we’ll see it a lot. We’ll see it shared by people or groups that seem to be “like us.” It wears down our ability to be skeptical and reject claims that would otherwise seem fantastical.
As media technology advances, it becomes easier for more people to create media that looks like media that formerly only limited people (usually with editorial standards) could create, and thus easier to deceive people
ULTIMATELY: This isn’t new! Humans aren’t naturally good at the skepticism required to question what we see, and know when to go seek sources/backup data… but we get generationally better at it because we don’t grow up trusting the old markers. Zoomers don’t get scammed by Nigerian Princes.
Good news: the same ways to fool us don’t last
The bad news: media technology is changing faster, and might be changing faster than generations can come about and grow up to be resistant to new forms of BS
- ReConsider Moment
If we get one of those wild election scenarios due to the Trump campaign trying to meddle with the results, we’re all going to have a very, very bad time… especially if Trump gets a 2nd term despite decisively losing the election.
This is the worst possible outcome not because Trump stays in office, but because Americans would lose faith in the election process entirely. If you go win an election, and then don’t end up President, what’s the point? If someone can lose an election and use shenanigans to actually remain President, then our Constitution starts to crumble. Nobody should want that. The good news is that unless it’s a razor-thin election, the patah to pulling that off is extremely bleak for whoever loses… probably the President.
And how can Republicans and Democrats disagree so fiercely on what is even true?
As much as we’d like to think we form our opinions from balancing facts against each other, enough studies have shown that’s objectively not true. No matter our political leaning, we tend to get information from people we trust. I haven’t done the hardcore research that scientists have done to decide I think climate change is a real risk–I have chosen to trust academics because I believe they’re credible. I have not personally synthesized vaccines; I trust the peer-reviewed studies which say they’re safe. That’s true for almost all of us: we use markers that suggest credibility to decide what’s true… and of course we’re full of confirmation bias. I believe this leads to the growing divergent realities we’re seeing in the American and European political chasms. We will get wiser to some of the BS that we see today, and places like Facebook/Twitter/Youtube may get better at enforcing “journalistic standards” for content makers (such as Twitter’s “Birdwatch), but it’s a cat-and-mouse game: BSers can create new ones, too. It’s a brave new world, and might be a scary one.
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