Tag Archives: propaganda

Misinformation As A “Wicked Problem”

I continue to be a “when” person, not an “if” person. What I mean by that is that I become more convinced every day that America will emerge from the disaster that is Trump and MAGA, and that the pertinent questions we will face have to do with how we will repair things when that day comes and we have to repair not just the damage done by the mad would-be king, but the structural flaws that enabled his unfit occupancy in the Oval Office.

Political scientists, sociologists, lawyers, law professors and a wide variety of experts in other fields are already offering their perspectives on how to address the Supreme Court’s corruption, protect Americans’ voting rights, jettison (or at least alter) the filibuster, and neuter the Electoral College– proposals intended to fix the structural weaknesses that have become all too obvious.

In most of these areas, we’ll undoubtedly argue about the approaches and details, but fixes are possible.

There is, however, one truly enormous problem that has no simple answer. As I have repeatedly noted on this platform, we live today in an absolute ocean of mis- and dis-information. There are literally thousands of internet sites created to tell us untruths that we want to believe, technologies that were created to mislead, cable and streaming channels in the business of reinforcing our preferred biases–even psuedo-education organizations that exist solely to propagandize our children. There is no simple remedy, no policy prescription that can “fix” the Wild West of our “information” environment–and virtually any effort to shut down propaganda will run afoul of the First Amendment and its essential Free Speech guarantees.

The widespread availability of misinformation is what academics call a “wicked problem.” Wicked problems have a number of characteristics that make them difficult to manage and– practically speaking– impossible to actually solve. They can’t be fully defined because their components are constantly changing; there’s no one “right” solution– possible solutions aren’t true or false, but rather good or bad, and what’s good for one aspect of the problem might exacerbate another part (in other words, the interconnections mean that solving one part of the problem can easily aggravate other parts); and there’s no clear point at which you can say the problem is solved.

Misinformation is a whole set of wicked problems– on steroids.

As a Brookings Institution publication put it some time back, 

Disinformation and other online problems are not conventional problems that can be solved individually with traditional regulation. Instead, they are a web of interrelated “wicked” problems — problems that are highly complex, interdependent, and unstable — and can only be mitigated, managed, or minimized, not solved.

The Brookings paper recommended development of what it called “an architecture” that would “promote collaboration and build trust among stakeholders.” It noted the availability of several models that currently promote collaboration among a number of  stakeholders, including the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) and the Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs). These and similar successful organizations have learned how to adapt and innovate, and have focused on trust-building and information-sharing.

Any effective effort to counter misinformation and propaganda will need to go beyond the creation of other, similar organizations. If and when we re-institute a rational government and are gifted with a working Congress, there will be a role for (hopefully thoughtful) regulation. And of course, long term, the most effective mechanism must be education. Students need to be taught to recognize the difference between credible and non-credible sources, shown how to spot the markers of conspiracy theories and propaganda, and given tools to distinguish between deep fakes and actual photography.

The crux of the problem, of course, is that all-too-human desire to justify one’s particular beliefs and biases–the allure of “information” that confirms what that individual wants to believe. We all share that impulse, and its existence is what makes the manipulation of data and the creation of “alternative” facts so attractive. It’s also what feeds “othering,” bigotries and self-righteousness.

The persistence of that very human desire is what makes misinformation–also known as propaganda–such a wicked problem.

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Let Us Count The Ways…

It’s impossible for most of us to keep up with the unconstitutional, corrupt and overwhelmingly stupid actions of Trump and his merry band of incompetents and bigots–so today I thought I’d enumerate just a few of the actions that are taking my country down the path to fascism and global irrelevance. 

Keep in mind that this is a very partial list…..

The FCC has threatened to pull licenses from networks whose coverage of our thin-skinned president hurts his feelings. (What First Amendment?)

Is factual economic news negative? The government will eliminate quarterly reports by public companies, tighten controls on the release of employment data, and delay the release of inflation data, obvious moves to suppress facts and prevent citizens from understanding our declining economic health. As Lincoln Square recently reported,

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) abruptly postponed its consumer expenditures report, the dataset that determines how inflation is measured in the year ahead. No explanation was given. No new date set.

Last year, when the release was delayed, the agency cited an error and announced a rescheduled publication; this year it offered neither explanation nor date. The absence is striking because the report is central to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which shapes interest rates, wages, and the daily cost of living. Critics warn the delay is not accidental but political.

It’s not just economic data. The administration has removed statistics from DOJ websites that inconveniently showed that right-wing violence is by far the nation’s biggest domestic threat. RFK’s HHS is removing data that demonstrates vaccine effectiveness. Etc.

The administration is frantically trying to distract attention from its non-disclosure of the Epstein files. (Pretty much confirms that you-know-who is in those files…)

The administration’s war against education keeps ramping up. Assaults against universities, efforts to destroy public education, demands that museums and national parks scrub the parts of history Trump doesn’t like have recently been joined by administration plans to partner with Christian Nationalist organization Prager U to create a new “Civics Education” for the nation’s children. (Can we spell White Christian indoctrination??)

Does our tech sector rely on recruiting “the best and brightest” from around the world? Hit those “furriners” with a 100,000 fee per visa. 

The corruption of this administration becomes more obvious every day. Not only is Trump making out like the bandit he is with patently illegal grifts, not only has he instructed the Department of Justice to bring phony charges against his political enemies (and fired ethical lawyers who refused to manufacture evidence), his administration has also shut down investigation of his border czar’s bribery–despite the fact that Homan’s acceptance of $50,000 from undercover FBI agents was captured on tape.

As I said in my introductory paragraph, this is a very partial list of the wreckage being done every minute of every day by the idiots and grifters currently in charge of our federal government. As Paul Krugman recently detailed in his Substack, what passes for policy in this administration is insane.

We attracted investment from around the world in part because we had rule of law: Businesses trusted us to honor property rights and enforce contracts. So the Trumpists turned us into a nation where the government extorts ownership shares in corporations and masked government agents seize foreign workers, put them in chains, and imprison them under terrible conditions.

We lead the world in science thanks to our unmatched network of research universities and globally admired government agencies like the National Institutes of Health. So the Trumpists are doing their best to destroy both university and government research.

And our economic success — the way we have pulled ahead of other advanced nations over the past generation — rests almost entirely on our leadership in digital technology. So the Trumpists are pulling the rug out from under tech, too.

H-1B visas are a critical ingredient in America’s success. They allow the best and the brightest from around the world to teach in our universities, do research in our research institutes, and work in our tech sector.

Every day, Americans are inundated with propaganda extolling these incredibly harmful attacks on our liberties, our economic well-being and our global preeminence. Thanks to MAGA’s unremitting attacks on those who dare to tell the truth, it gets more and more difficult to separate propaganda from journalism, fact from fiction.

That difficulty is immensely dangerous.

Hannah Arendt said it best, back in 1951, in Origins of Totalitarianism: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” 

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Media Fragmentation And Minority Voters

I know I keep harping on the subject of our media environment, but as more research becomes available, I become more and more convinced that an enormous amount of political and voting behavior is the result of the fragmentation facilitated by the Internet–a fragmentation enabling people to occupy a chosen bubble of “news” that reinforces their ideological beliefs and prejudices.

The Washington Post recently ran a lengthy article that probed the much-discussed rightward movement within minority communities. 

That phenomenon in recent U.S. elections has mirrored voter movements elsewhere, and the research was an effort to determine whether those movements had causal commonalities. The scholarship cited was all interesting, and I encourage you to click through and read it in its entirely, but one conclusion stood out. The article noted that Trump’s inroads into the Black and Hispanic communities was tied to the nature of the media sources those voters consulted.

The declining influence of television news, for example, has been stark. As the article noted, Democrats have always done well with U.S. minorities who follow political news on television, and they still won 73 percent of those voters in 2024. But their support among those who didn’t follow the election on TV was only 46 percent.

And, for perhaps the first time, the share of Americans following the presidential election on TV began to fall in 2024. It dropped from 85 percent to 81 percent. We don’t know what’s replacing it, though we do know that the share who got political news on TikTok soared from 22 percent in 2020 to 33 percent in 2024 — and that TikTok is the only medium through which U.S. minorities were more likely to follow politics compared with Whites.

Similarly, a March poll from the Pew Research Center found that 30 percent of minority voters who supported Trump got at least some of their news from “The Joe Rogan Experience” — putting the Trump-endorsing podcast behind only Fox News in that group. (To be sure, other sources were also close enough to be within the margin of error, and Pew’s Elisa Shearer cautioned that our media choice can be an effect of our political views as much as it is a cause of them.)

Minority neighborhoods traditionally tended to coalesce around a given candidate when residents of those neighborhoods got their news from similar, predominantly mainstream, sources. But as the media environment has balkanized, the electorate has split into smaller and less predictable units.

Over the last decades, as culture war has consumed American politics, minority voters who are culturally conservative but economically liberal —a cohort that includes many working-class minorities and immigrants — have begun to base their votes on cultural issues rather than economic ones. That trend has been supercharged by what the article called the “algorithm-driven fragment of the media,” the social media platforms that turn cultural concerns into cultural outrage by constantly amplifying moral- or emotional-based messages, a practice that encourages user commitment to the platform. (Yes, follow the money…or in this case, the business model.)

As one scholar explained it,

“Social media can subtly shape people’s information diet because algorithms are attuned to what people are engaging with online…. “So if someone’s paying attention to content that leans a little more socially conservative, the algorithm will feed you more and more of that. And before you know it, you’re in an informational ecosystem that’s pretty different from what you’d see tuning into mainstream media.”

In other words, the dramatic changes we have experienced in our media environment have fostered ideological, educational and gender divides, splintering communities that were once defined first by racial or cultural identities.

I have no idea what can be done about the balkanization of the media. I am very afraid that we can’t put that genie back in the bottle– allowing government to determine the content of internet sites would be even more dangerous than today’s  environment of propaganda and disinformation. Fact-checking sites are only useful for people who care about facts, and that is an unfortunately small percentage of the population.

Perhaps legislation dictating what algorithms can and cannot do would avoid violating the First Amendment, but from where this digital novice sits, it’s unclear how such a law would be framed or how it could be enforced.

We live in a world where people who desperately want to believe clearly untrue things– that climate change is a myth, that vaccines cause autism, that “chemtrails” are poisoning us, that “woke-ism” is the reason they missed out on that promotion–can find confirmation of those beliefs in the Internet’s growing never-never land.

Members of minority communities aren’t exempt.

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The Loss Of The Lie Detector

As the country I thought I inhabited continues to disintegrate, I’ve become more and more convinced that what I’ve called our “information landscape” is a major contributor to our civic woes.

We have created a world that allows us to “curate” our realities, to engage in what we used to call “cherry picking.” Want to believe that science is a scam and vaccines are mechanisms for inserting Microsoft chips in our bodies? A bit of Internet “research” will locate “news” sites that confirm your suspicions. Want to believe that the deranged ignoramus in the Oval Office actually knows what he’s doing? Ditto.

The media we now refer to as legacy outlets were far from perfect. “If it bleeds, it leads” dominated decisions about what was front-page news, and even outlets with a professional devotion to the obligations of gatekeeping overlooked important events and misread others. But at their best, they acted as lie detectors–and public figures who feared that function were careful to moderate their misinformation, or at least cloak efforts at misdirection in ambiguities.

The Internet’s Wild West, where social media echoes and promotes the proliferation of Rightwing propaganda sites, is liar’s heaven. A buffoon as ridiculous as Trump, with his constant crazed, childish and misspelled posts, would never have ascended to the Presidency when actual journalists were the primary gatekeepers.

Cult leaders (Trump is the Jim Jones of MAGA) have always been able to bamboozle a slice of the population; a portion of humanity is demonstrably impervious to fact and logic. A healthier information environment would not diabuse the True Believers, who see Trump as the champion who will kill “woke-ism” and return straight White (Pseudo)Christian men to dominance. But the current fire hose of competing versions of reality is having the effect desired by autocrats everywhere–it paralyzes much larger segments of the population, who gradually despair of determining what is true, and simply check out.

Megan Garber addressed the issue in a recent essay in the Altlantic.

She noted that Trump had been reelected despite–or perhaps because of– the Big Lie, and she mused that, these days, false assertions evidently aren’t liabilities but selling points, “weapons of partisan warfare, disorienting perceived enemies (Democrats, members of the media) even as they foment broader forms of cynicism and mistrust.”

For decades, American politics have relied on the same logic that polygraph machines do: that liars will feel some level of shame when they tell their lies, and that the shame will manifest—the quickened heartbeat, the pang of guilt—in the body. But the body politic is cheating the test with alarming ease. Some Americans believe the lies. Others refuse to. Some Americans recognize the lies’ falsity but have decided that some things—their own tribe, their vision for the country—are simply more important than truth. Regardless, the lies remain, unchecked by the old machinery. The polygraph is a measure of conscience. So, in its way, is democracy.

Garber quoted Walter Lippman’s classic book, Public Opinion, in which he argued that democracy is a task of data management. American democracy “is premised on the idea that voters’ political decisions will be based on reliable information.”

The information people rely on to do the work of citizenship—voting, arguing, shaping a shared future—is data. But those data are processed by notoriously fickle hardware. The data inform our brains’ impressions of the world: the images that Lippmann called “the pictures in our heads.” The pictures are subjective. They are malleable. And, perhaps most of all, they make little distinction between things that are true and things that are merely believed to be….

In Public Opinion, Lippmann diagnosed how readily propaganda could make its way into a nation that was officially at peace. He outlined how seamlessly the false messages could mingle with, and override, true ones. He argued that Americans’ unsteady relationship with information made our democracy inherently fragile.

As Garber quite accurately notes, every lie Trump tells, no matter how consequential or petty (and Trump is nothing if not petty), erodes people’s ability to trust any and all information.

Falsehoods, issued repeatedly from the bully pulpit, threaten to become conventional wisdom, then clichés, then foregone conclusions. Attempts to challenge them, as crucial as those efforts are as matters of historical recordkeeping, take on a certain listlessness. For others to point out the truth is to do the right thing. It is also to bring paper straws to a gunfight.

As the zone is flooded with bullshit (in Steve Bannon’s memorable phrase), citizens check out. And the liars cement their power.

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The Root Of The Problem

I know, I know…I’ve repeatedly opined that the “root of the problem” is racism (defined as fear and loathing of all “Others”–including not just anti-Black and anti-Jewish animus, but the White Christian Nationalist effort to put women back in the kitchen and send immigrants with less than alabaster skin tones back to the “shithole” countries from which they came.) And I stand by that allegation.

That said, the current eruption of those long-simmering hatreds has been enormously facilitated by the information environment we inhabit.

In one of his daily newsletters, Robert Hubbell shared an observation that struck me as very true: he noted that, for MAGA Republicans, “truth is a pesky annoyance to be circumvented.” But government and the rule of law are dependent upon a polity that shares a “common view of facts rooted in reality.”

The Internet has been an incredible boon to humanity; it has allowed people to access virtually all of the information produced by mankind. It has made our lives more convenient–whatever one thinks of Jeff Bezos, old folks who can’t get out to shop, people who for one reason or another cannot drive, can order needed goods with a click and have those goods delivered to their doors, an enormous benefit. (Note: that online ordering need not be confined to Amazon.) 

The Internet has also enhanced free speech in a number of ways. For one thing, it frustrates efforts at censorship–as the scolds who try to remove books from school libraries have found. (Tell a teenager “you can’t read this book” and more often than not, you’ve piqued her interest in that book, which she can access easily enough via the Internet.) 

I could go on enumerating the positives of our new human connectivity. But like almost every aspect of human progress, there are downsides, and one of the most concerning is the immense growth of what we politely call “disinformation,” and what is more accurately called lying. Conspiracy theories. Propaganda. 

Let’s be honest–the Internet has made it possible to live in a chosen bubble, to inhabit an information environment that has been carefully curated to reinforce what a particular individual wishes to believe. That ability is steadily eroding the importance of empirical fact.

Over the long haul, it is likely that choosing to live in a world where “facts” are irrelevant is risky. Individuals who prefer to believe RFK, Jr’s fact-free animus toward vaccination die more frequently than those who accept medical science. Those who reject the humanity of people who are “different” live more fearful and far less interesting lives than the people who embrace diversity and learn from it.

If the negative outcomes were limited to the people making fact-free choices, the rest of us could shrug and leave them to their own (constricted) worldviews. After all, there have always been people who live in fantasies of their own construction, always been conspiracy theorists and science deniers. As a doctor/cousin of mine likes to say, there’s always been a market for snake oil.

But the Internet has vastly expanded the availability and reach of that snake oil. It has enormously facilitated the ability to inhabit a bubble that confirms one’s desired reality. In an increasingly complicated world, the temptation to retreat from that complexity also becomes greater. (Nor is that temptation limited to low-information citizens.)

For all my adult life, I have been a firm and vocal supporter of free speech–not because all speech is valuable, but because allowing government (or any authority) to decide what speech is allowable would be far–far–more dangerous than stupid, false, obscene or incendiary speech itself. The advent of the Internet and thousands of sites promoting propaganda and worse hasn’t changed my analysis. But it is impossible to ignore the fact that “alternate realities” available online do vastly greater damage than similar fantasies peddled via pamphlets or even by radio “personalities.”

Ultimately, the only counter-measure I can envision is better education. Better civic education, better instruction in logic, more instruction in how to determine the credibility of Internet reports. But that’s “ultimately.” I don’t know what we do today to counter the vast amounts of (excuse my language) horse-shit coming from MAGA and Trump and the Christian Nationalists. 

Let’s face it: the people who voted for Donald Trump do not occupy a fact-based reality. And thanks in large part to a vast Right-wing information ecosystem, there were enough of them to plunge America into the dark age we are experiencing.

We can only hope that when reality bites, it will be hard enough to waken enough of them…

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