Freaking out about disinformation might be making it worse
If anti-democracy politicians believe nobody can tell the difference between truth and lies, they behave accordingly
An old boss of mine, working in the area of online harms and social media, used to joke that his work wasn’t driven by a desire to make the world better, but to make it stable enough for him to live out the rest of his days relaxing on a desert island.
It used to make me wonder: what does that world even look like?
This is something that political scientists think about a lot. They ask questions like: what does a ‘healthy’ democracy look like? Is democracy around the world actually under threat? What does it mean for democracy to be under threat? Are we taking the threat too seriously, or not seriously enough? Does ‘sounding the alarm’ about the problem help? If so, when is the right time to sound the alarm? Are we doing it too early and artificially inflating the issue, or are we doing it too late to stop it?
I think even political scientists would admit they aren’t always the funnest dinner party guests.
When is it the right time to ‘freak out’ about democracy and disinformation?
In Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, the novel explores a counter-factual where Franklin Delano Roosevelt loses the presidency to Charles Lindbergh, a Hitler-sympathiser running on an ‘America First’ platform to keep the United States out of world war two.
The central cast of characters are a Jewish family and their wider community. One of the core themes of the book is the wide variety of responses to the growing threat of Lindbergh from those within the Jewish community. Some people flee the country, some get angry, some pretend everything is fine and some even collaborate.
I won’t spoil the ending for those of you who’d like to read it (I strongly recommend), but the message of the book is that those who raised the alarm about the danger of Lindbergh and his politics of hate and disinformation were right to. The obvious lesson for us today is to do the same, and this has always guided my work.
But what if we’re not helping? Or worse, what if we are exacerbating the issue?
Cambridge Analytica: How hysteria about disinformation can be more damaging than the disinformation itself
For the uninitiated, the Cambridge Analytica scandal involved the unauthorised access of personal data from millions of Facebook users by a company working on political campaigns. This data was used to create detailed voter profiles, which were then used to target specific messages or ads to influence people's opinions or votes. It sparked widespread concerns about privacy on social media platforms.
What if the following two statements were true: the Cambridge Analytica scandal represented a dangerous and immoral use of personal data and it didn’t actually have the impact on voter behaviour that many of us think it did?
This is the argument made by Dr David Karpf, an associate professor at George Washington University in his essay On Digital Disinformation and Democratic Myths. He makes a persuasive argument that the response to disinformation scandals like Cambridge Analytica can be more harmful than the scandal itself. His argument can be split in to two sub-arguments.
We don’t have solid proof that disinformation ‘works’ in the way we think it does. There is no conclusive evidence that disinformation achieves the goal of significantly influencing a desired voter behaviour. For example, when Russian trolls tried to stoke real-world protests barely anyone showed up, a paper published in Nature found “scant science” behind Cambridge Analytica’s psychographic targeting techniques and a meta analysis found that political persuasion efforts more generally have ‘zero’ effect on average.
The hysteria about disinformation implicitly promotes the idea that the public are no longer able to effectively scrutinise politicians — which makes them behave worse. Karpf argues that politics used to be built on something called ‘the myth of the attentive public’. It’s not a myth in the sense that it’s false, but it’s the shared belief that the public are watching politicians carefully, so they must tell the truth and obey democratic norms. The hysteria around disinformation instead implicitly promotes ‘the myth of the digital propaganda wizards’, which is the idea that public opinion is actually being controlled by shadowy, digital forces and puppetmasters — thus freeing up politicians to disobey political norms as they please. If a democratic norm is violated and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
And it’s this new-found freedom that is being abused by those seeking to destroy or degrade democracy.
Finding the balance between Lindbergh and the propaganda wizards
This doesn’t mean that disinformation isn’t deeply immoral, a threat to democracy or something we should protect ourselves against. It does however throw some cold water on those who may seek to keep you up at night with nightmare-ish visions of everyone you know and love being brainwashed by a ‘Russian troll’.
So how concerned should be?
For me personally, when I read The Plot Against America I find that I have a bit of each of the characters inside me. The desperation, the despondency, the determination and the denial, all mixed together.
While we can take lessons from our history — whether that’s the 1930s or some other time — it can misleadingly feel like an inevitable unfolding of events, a playbook which we can learn from and try to disrupt. The truth is, however, there is no playbook and there is no inevitable path.
Do we freak out? We’ll have to decide this one for ourselves.
‘As Lindbergh's election couldn't have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned the wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as "History," harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.’
— Phillip Roth, The Plot Against America
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