Tag Archives: disinformation

The Real Problem

Bingo!

That was my reaction when I read the title of this opinion essay in the Washington Post: “Can we find common ground without a shared reality?” The author, Kate Cohen, identified the fallacy at the heart of multiple liberal admonitions to “listen to” and “try to understand” the grievances motivating MAGA Trump supporters. She began by reporting on one such well-meaning example, in a recent book, Kurt Gray’s “Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground.”

According to Gray,

Liberals and conservatives arrive at different moral conclusions because we weigh harms differently based on whom we believe to be vulnerable. Take the issue of abortion: I am more concerned for the pregnant person; a pro-lifer is more concerned for the fetus. But we both want to prevent harm.
 
Gray calls harm “the master key of morality”; it unlocks our understanding of moral judgments. “When someone has an opinion we find immoral, we can ask ourselves, ‘What harm do they see?’”

Cohen says she can try to understand that her neighbor isn’t purposely voting to harm her gay son and teenage daughter, but rather to prevent harms that the neighbor believes are posed by acceptance of LGBTQ+ folks and a woman’s right to make her own reproductive decisions. But then she asks the “bingo” question: “what if the harm she sees … isn’t real?”

Thus Gray points out that antigay crusader Anita Bryant “saw gay rights as a threat to her children” — he’s not saying she was right, just that she was acting from sincere concern. His research similarly refrains from privileging what I would call “fact.” One study he designed flip-flopped gun control statistics to see if people were worse at math when they didn’t like the answer; another, measuring how online outrage is built, included tweets about “the dangers of critical race theory.” It’s the perception of harm that matters…

I think we’re in this mess because one side’s perception of harm is increasingly disconnected from reality. I’d happily live in a world where my neighbor and I could discuss which harms concerned us more: the suffering of refugee children or the burdens on border-town citizens. The livelihood of coal miners or the warming of the globe. But in the world we live in — the world that reelected President Donald Trump — there’s a strong chance she believes that immigrants are eating pets and that climate change is a hoax.

And that –the refusal of millions of people to accept facts, evidence and demonstrable reality and opting to reside in a fantasy universe–is the crux of our current problem. 

On this blog, I have repeatedly argued that the information environment we inhabit enables a large percentage of the population to indulge in confirmation bias. Granted, there have always been sources of disinformation, but never before in history has it been so easy to access “evidence” that confirms one’s desired beliefs and prejudices.

Has your life failed to unfold as you hoped? Are you convinced that some “other” is to blame for your disappointments? There are literally hundreds–probably thousands–of websites that explain that the Black person or woman got the promotion because of “wokism,” and why the elevation of that non-Christian is evidence that “DEI hires” have replaced merit.

Is your livelihood or comfort level connected to the prospects of fossil fuels? There are plenty of “sources” that will confirm the perfidy of scientists who are “in on” the “global warming hoax.” 

Are you suspicious of all science–especially when it is based on empirical data that conflicts with your “biblical” understandings? “Bible-believing” websites will explain why the doctors trying to explain why abortion bans threaten women’s health and lives are just anti-religious liberals intent on killing babies and allowing women to ignore their God-ordained submissive roles.

Are you uncomfortable around gay folks? Lots of “religious” sites will confirm that they are “ungodly groomers,” (and that all those mainstream media reports implicating youth pastors and other pious church folks are exaggerated).

I could go on. And on.

We live in a world where technology–and yes, free speech–facilitates the construction of fantasy realities. And as Cohen accurately notes, finding “common ground” with folks who live in alternate universes simply isn’t possible.

Thanks to well-meaning liberals trying to reach that “common ground,” we are now inhabiting a country that–as Paul Krugman recently wrote– is being ruled by a mad king living in an alternate reality and a erratic, ketamine-fueled oligarch — and it’s not clear which is the other’s sidekick.

Finding “common ground” with madmen is suicidal.

Comments

Missing Information

At a recent doctor’s appointment, the assistant began by asking  the routine questions with which we are all familiar, concluding with “have you been depressed lately?” When I responded “Ever since the election,” that opened the floodgates–she confided to being terrified, angry, and desperately worried about the world her small daughter will inherit.

Millions of Americans are having similar conversations.

Given the firehose of rash and destructive assaults on poorly-understood agencies and programs, most of us are worrying about personal effects of the chaos: will my Social Security payment arrive? Will Medicare/Medicaid benefits be cut? What will Trump’s love affair with tariffs do to the stock market and my retirement accounts? Will the confirmation of an anti-science kook with a brain worm invite another pandemic?

Others wonder why we are spitting on America’s allies.

Given the sheer number of things to find appalling, it’s understandable that relatively few of us are focusing on an even more ominous aspect of this effort to destroy the federal government: the erasure of data from government websites. A recent report from In the Public Interest spelled out some consequences of those erasures.

The collection and dissemination of accurate data and findings fuel research all over the nation, in academic programs, think tanks, hospitals, private labs, and in state and local governments. But this isn’t just a problem for researchers whose projects or even life’s work have been interrupted or derailed. It’s the human cost of this loss that should worry all of us.

More than 8,000 web pages across a dozen U.S. government websites were purged, and while it covers everything from a veterans’ entrepreneurship programs to a NASA site, the purge of webpages and datasets related to public health is particularly alarming. The purges, which include more than 3,000 pages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have removed information and articles about vaccines, tuberculosis surveillance, veterans’ care, women’s health, HIV testing and prevention measures, Alzheimer’s warning signs, and overdose prevention training, among many other topics.

The datasets that have disappeared include large-scale national health surveys, indices, and data dashboards that are essential for policy makers and the public.

I spent 21 years teaching law and policy, and a bedrock principle of both was the importance of facts and evidence–the rather obvious connection between an accurate understanding of the reality of a situation and efforts to adjudicate it fairly or remedy its deficits via policy change.

The political disputes that have gotten us to this point have been significantly affected by the vast amounts of misinformation, disinformation and lack of information that have bolstered various bigotries while ignoring reality. (If you accept Musk’s description of programs with which he disagrees as “fraud and waste,” discussion of the merits of those programs–or the consequences of their sudden termination– becomes irrelevant.)

The erasure of data accumulated in rigorous studies–studies we taxpayers have funded and to which we are entitled–is an attack on knowledge and reality. The erasures are in service of MAGA bigotries– efforts to eliminate any mention of gay or trans people, avoid recognition of racial and gender realities, distort medical science and ignore climate change.

A  Guardian essay (link unavailable) noted the ridiculous extent of the purges.

Thanks to Donald Trump’s sweeping executive orders attacking “gender ideology” and DEI programs, the word “women” – along with a number of other terms – is quite literally being erased. The likes of NASA have been busy scrubbing mentions of terms related to women in leadership from public websites in an attempt to comply with Trump’s executive orders, for example. Agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have taken down numerous webpages related to gender in the wake of Trump’s orders – although a federal judged ordered on Tuesday that they should be reinstated.

Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has an internal list of hot-button words (which include “women”, “gender”, “minority”, “biases”) that they are cross-referencing against active research projects and grant applications. The Washington Post reports that once one of these very dangerous words is identified, staff then have to go through a flowchart to see whether a research project should be flagged for further review.

The National Institutes of Health and multiple university research departments are going through a similar dystopian exercise. Researchers at the University of California at San Diego, for example, have said their work is now at risk if it contains language deemed potentially problematic, including the word “women”.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Newspeak was the language created by Oceana to meet the Party’s ideological requirements. It limited people’s ability to think critically–after all, if you lack the word for something, does it exist?

Welcome to Oceana.

Comments

Words and Meanings

Can we Americans talk to each other? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be no, and the intentional misuse of language is one reason we can’t.

I think it was GOP strategist Frank Luntz who first advised his party to obscure its goals by using phrases that softened/concealed meaning; he even wrote a book back in 2007 titled “Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear.” As Deborah Tannen pointed out in 2003 (link unavailable),

Take the repeal of the estate tax. An “estate” sounds like a large amount of money. Indeed, before President Bush persuaded Congress to legislate a phase out of the estate tax, only the largest 2 percent of estates were subject to this tax. But change the name to “death tax” and many more Americans become sympathetic to repeal. After all, everyone dies. Death is bad enough without being taxed.

How many would get all worked up about an exceedingly rare abortion procedure (that the Alan Guttmacher Institute estimated represents less than one-fifth of 1 percent of all abortions performed in the United States in 2000)? But attach the name “partial-birth abortion” and a second-trimester fetus becomes a half-born baby. 

Who among us wants to call ourselves anti-life? Win the name game and you’re more than halfway toward winning the battle. Win enough naming battles and you’re on your way to winning the war.

Since the demise of Roe v. Wade, we’ve all become familiar with arguments about what it means to be “pro life.” Nice human beings all want to be supportive of life, but Red state legislators are rather clearly unconcerned with the lives of rape victims or women with dangerous pregnancies; they are also unconcerned with the health and wellbeing of those babies they’ve “saved” once they’re born. (And how “pro life” is the GOP’s all-in support for gun “rights”? Is defense of permitless carry really consistent with calling oneself “pro life”?)

The use of language to mask what’s really going on is hardly limited to the abortion debate. Take the indiscriminate use of the word choice. Choice is a great term; it can be positive–as in citizens’ ability to choose a religion, a marriage partner, or whether to procreate (choices the GOP’s Christian Nationalists oppose), or it can be a word that masks less positive “choices”–destroying the public school system via “school choice,” or “choosing” not to open your place of business to Blacks or gays. 

That latter “choice” brings me to another highly contested term: religious liberty. Who isn’t for religious liberty–the right to believe or live as one’s conscience dictates?

What today’s MAGA GOP means by religious liberty, however, is their right to remake the law of land in order to privilege fundamentalist Christianity–to return women, gays, non-Whites and non-Christians to the subordinate status in American society that their religion dictates. Requiring obedience to civil rights laws violates that dominance. (Serving that slice of pizza to a gay person clearly imposes upon their religious liberty…) 

The publication of Project 2025 provides evidence that intentional misuse of language continues to shape far-Right discourse; for example, the effort to destroy the civil service is presented as a path toward “efficiency.” (In this case, that may even be a proper use of language–dictatorships are usually more efficient than messy democracies.)

Project 2025 is also strong on “family values”–another term favored by a political party that certainly doesn’t value “those” families. What Project 2025 calls “family values” are policies that discriminate against LGBTQ+ citizens and women, and emphasize the importance of traditional nuclear families.

There are other words that obscure rather than illuminate. A recent favorite is “weaponization”–an accusation hurled at government officials applying existing laws to Republicans. Another is actually a new word: “woke.” Woke-ism is basically a commitment to fundamental fairness for all American citizens, which raises the question why it produces so hysterical a negative response.

These newer terms join old favorites like “socialism”–the Rightwing’s preferred label for any social program. Social Security and Medicare were originally opposed (and still are) as “socialist.” (Again, as with “efficiency” the label isn’t incorrect–just pejorative. The U.S., like all modern societies, has a mixed economy, with a robust private sector protected by socialized efforts like police, fire protection, garbage collection and other collective services.)

I’m sure readers can come up with other examples. Disinformation would be impossible without the ability to disguise truth  by misusing and distorting language. I believe it was French diplomat Charles Maurice De Talleyrand who famously said that “God gave humans language so they could conceal their thoughts from one another.”

No wonder Americans are having difficulty communicating…. 

Comments

You Are What You Read…

Remember when nutritionists admonished us with the phrase “you are what you eat”? A recent report from Harvard’s Kennedy school has modernized it, warning that–in our era of pervasive propaganda and misinformation–we are what we read (or otherwise access).

The study explored the media consumption of participants, and the degree to which the unreliability of that media left them with inaccurate beliefs about COVID-19 and vaccination. The researchers found that “the average bias and reliability of participants’ media consumption are significant predictors of their perceptions of false claims about COVID-19 and vaccination.”

I know–your first thought was “duh.” Did we really need a study showing that people who depend on garbage media believe ridiculous things? Wouldn’t logic tell us that?

Still, what seems self-evident can often prove less than conclusive, so confirmation of that logic in a rigorous study is important. In addition, the study confirmed politically-relevant differences in media consumption and credulity between Republicans and Democrats.

Here’s their summary of the study:

  • We surveyed 3,276 U.S. adults, applying Ad Fontes Media’s (2023) ratings of media bias and reliability to measure these facets of participants’ preferred news sources. We also probed their perceptions of inaccurate claims about COVID-19 and vaccination.
  • We found participants who tend to vote for Democrats—on average—consume less biased and more reliable media than those who tend to vote for Republicans. We found these (left-leaning) participants’ media reliability moderates the relationship between their media’s bias and their degree of holding false beliefs about COVID-19 and vaccination.
  • Unlike left-leaning media consumers, right-leaning media consumers’ misinformed beliefs seem largely unaffected by their news sources’ degree of (un)reliability. 
  • This study introduces and investigates a novel means of measuring participants’ selected news sources: employing Ad Fontes’s (2023) media bias and media reliability ratings. It also suggests the topic of COVID-19, among many other scientific fields of recent decades, has fallen prey to the twin risks of a politicized science communication environment and accompanying group-identity-aligned stances so often operating in the polarized present. 

The researchers found that the news-seeking and news-avoiding behaviors of the participants confirmed “the longstanding concern that those who embrace—and subsequently seek out—misinformation, even if inadvertently, constitute a group at risk of endangering their own and others’ health.”

In a country sharply divided along partisan lines, the implications rather obviously go further.

As any student of history–especially the history of journalism–can attest, America has always produced biased sources of information. What is different now, thanks to the Internet and social media, is its ubiquity–and greatly increased political motivation to seek out confirmatory “information.”

Other studies tell us that people who want to believe X do not necessarily change their belief in X when confronted with evidence that X is inaccurate. The Harvard study found that anti-vaccine attitudes were “tenacious and challenging to counter, unyielding to evidence, and bolstered by persuasive anti-vaccine messaging—which is not difficult to find and immerse oneself in. In the COVID-19 context, several identity groups appear to have engaged in this immersion.”

Some research has suggested that confrontation with contrary facts can lead to what is called a “backfire effect,” causing people to double down and become even more stubborn in their original beliefs. (Facebook found, for example, that warning users that an article was false caused people to share that article even more.) Other research has suggested that fact-checking, if done properly, can often successfully correct misperceptions. But…

First, facts and scientific evidence are not the most powerful and easy way to encourage people to abandon false or inaccurate beliefs and perspectives. Second, people embrace fake news, misinformation and disinformation because of their beliefs, even if they can be proven wrong, exercising, in many cases, a demonstration of tribal loyalty. Third, engaging in a dialogue in a non-threatening manner to avoid defense mechanisms from activating with personal stories has a greater likelihood of success.

Even when encounters with the facts might actually cause a reconsideration, it turns out that the algorithms used by social media platforms increasingly shield users from information they might find uncongenial. Those “likes” we register act as guidelines used to feed us more of the posts we’ll “like,” and shield us from contrary perspectives or facts that might debunk our preferred prejudices.

And now, the deepfakes are coming.

On the one hand, several sites are available that evaluate the credibility of the sources we consult. On the other hand, no one can force people to visit those sites or believe their ratings.

it has never been easier to avoid uncongenial realities and evade critical thinking…..

Comments

Finland Leads The Way

I don’t think it is hyperbole to say that misinformation, disinformation and propaganda are at the heart of all of the other problems we face. After all, as any medical practitioner will tell you, prescribing a remedy requires an accurate diagnosis of the problem, and to the extent that our informational Wild West misleads us, such accuracy eludes us.

Worse, the Internet’s multitude of “facts” allows us to choose a “diagnosis” based upon our ideological preferences–we believe what we want to believe. If the problem is lazy poor folks, there’s no point raising taxes on the rich. if the problem is greedy rich folks, higher tax rates will be part of the solution.

If my own diagnosis is correct–if all of our problems are rooted in or exacerbated by our population’s growing inability to separate truth from fiction, wheat from chaff–is there a prescription for that?

Finland’s approach looks promising.

Finland ranked No. 1 of 41 European countries on resilience against misinformation for the fifth time in a row in a survey published in October by the Open Society Institute in Sofia, Bulgaria. Officials say Finland’s success is not just the result of its strong education system, which is one of the best in the world, but also because of a concerted effort to teach students about fake news. Media literacy is part of the national core curriculum starting in preschool.

The article, from the New York Times, began with an example:

A typical lesson that Saara Martikka, a teacher in Hameenlinna, Finland, gives her students goes like this: She presents her eighth graders with news articles. Together, they discuss: What’s the purpose of the article? How and when was it written? What are the author’s central claims?

“Just because it’s a good thing or it’s a nice thing doesn’t mean it’s true or it’s valid,” she said. In a class last month, she showed students three TikTok videos, and they discussed the creators’ motivations and the effect that the videos had on them.

Her goal, like that of teachers around Finland, is to help students learn to identify false information.

The United States was not included in the survey, which was limited to European countries, but there’s plenty of evidence that misinformation and disinformation are widespread in the U.S.  Polls show that Americans’ trust in the news media is at record lows.

A survey by Gallup, published in October, found that just 34 percent of Americans trusted the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly, slightly higher than the lowest number that the organization recorded, in 2016. In Finland, 76 percent of Finns consider print and digital newspapers to be reliable, according to an August survey commissioned by a trade group representing Finnish newspapers that was conducted by IRO Research, a market research company.

If we Americans were inclined to learn from others–not a noticeable national trait, unfortunately–we might take a lesson from the article’s description of what Finland has going for it, including a public school system that ranks among the best in the world, free college, high trust in government, and even higher respect for teachers.

Ah, well…..

In all fairness, there are some Finnish advantages we don’t share: Finnish is spoken only by about 5.4 million people, so disinformation produced by foreign speakers or bots is more  easily identified because of grammatical or syntax errors. In the U.S., not only do we have millions of people for whom English is a second language, we also have tens of millions of native English speakers whose command of grammar, spelling and syntax makes this former English teacher weep. So some clues that are available to Finns aren’t available to us.

And unlike far too many Americans, Finns evidently believe it is the proper goal of the schools to equip students with intellectual tools–not  to indoctrinate them with a particular view of their country or the other people who inhabit it. The article quoted one Finnish teacher who explained that she believed her job was to teach students “methods they can use to distinguish between truth and fiction. I can’t make them think just like me,” she said. “I just have to give them the tools to make up their own opinions.”

I’m sure those misnamed “Moms for Liberty” would disagree. Strenuously.

In the U.S., the goal of too many self-identified “patriotic Americans” isn’t to equip students to think, or to spot disinformation–it’s to ensure that they accept the correct disinformation.

No wonder so many Americans believe “facts” that just aren’t so.

Comments