A tactical shift in social media propaganda?

Zuckerberg -- Liar or truth teller?

Misleading propaganda from politics-related sites are among some of the most popular sources of online interaction with people. Misleading propaganda is up a notch in sophistication compared to simple lying. Instead of merely asserting blatant lies, misleading content is more subtle. One can call this lies of omission because the intent is to deceive as is the case with simple lying. Misleading content is harder to fact check and harder to expose as intentional propaganda because of differences in how different people perceive information and think about it. 

One interesting trend is that people are less engaged with sites that sites that repeatedly post outright lies and blatantly false information. That data indicates that some of the public has become aware of the amount of lying that drives a lot of politics-related news content and consciously wants to avoid it. The Washington Post writes:

More than 1 in 5 interactions — such as shares, likes or comments — with U.S. sites from April to June happened on “outlets that gather and present information irresponsibly,” according to a report by the German Marshall Fund.

This includes outlets such as the Daily Wire, TMZ, the Epoch Times and Breitbart[1] that researchers say “distort or misrepresent information to make an argument or report on a subject,” a metric determined by NewsGuard, a website cited in the study that rates the credibility of news sources. Researchers say these sources, which they argue spread subtler but still harmful forms of misinformation, are decidedly different from sites that publish overtly false news.

“These are the kinds of sites that will cherry pick anecdotes and are giving rise to vaccine hesitancy and other kinds of conspiracy theories,” said Karen Kornbluh, director of the German Marshall Fund’s Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative, a public policy think tank.

Researchers highlighted articles that they say “disproportionately amplify vaccine-hesitant voices over experts” and “fail to mention risks of not being vaccinated against covid-19,” such as a June story on football, titled, “NFL Wide Receiver Refuses Vaccine, Wants To ‘Represent’ Other Silent Players.”

While platforms have cracked down on black-and-white cases of fiction masquerading as fact, they are still grappling with how to handle murky yet wide-reaching cases that stop short of falsehood. [lies are usually a lot easier to fact check and debunk than flawed motivated reasoning (crackpottery)]

“What we really see is that the information environment has changed dramatically,” said Kornbluh, who served as U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development under the Obama administration.

The ratio of misleading content marks a five-year high for Facebook, where “false content producers” have received a higher share of engagement in the past, according to the findings. At the same time, engagement with U.S. sites that repeatedly share outright false information — going a step beyond merely misrepresenting information — has plummeted across Facebook and Twitter. 

On Twitter, 9 percent of shares by verified accounts to U.S. sites went to misleading sites, while 3 percent went to sites that publish false content, marking a three-year low for both categories.

WaPo goes on to comment that cracking down on false content producers is low hanging fruit. It will be harder for social media to figure out how to deal with an information ecosystem increasingly shades of gray as the sophistication of propaganda increases. Obviously, sites like Daily Wire and Breitbart that rely on divisive, deceptive propaganda will continue to refine their dark art, so those sources of social poison are not going to go away unless people finally realize they are being manipulated and betrayed. It may be the case that outright lies will have to play a smaller role in deceiving and polarizing people into irrational states of mind. 

The open question is whether the more subtle propaganda will be as effective as the blunt stuff that pushed us to the poisoned society we have today. Some evidence hints that subtle deceit may be somewhat less effective than a blunderbuss packed with lies. WaPo commented that engagement decreased among U.S. sites in the second quarter, dropped significantly faster for misleading sites compared to reliable sites with a high trustworthiness rating. That is quite encouraging. Maybe society’s defenses against the dark arts are slowly increasing.

If only social media companies could be trusted. WaPo reports that some evidence indicates that Facebook is lying about some of this the data to limit damage to its reputation. Content with lies has been a money-maker for social media companies, so there is an economic incentive for them to keep the lies coming. This reporting therefore has to be taken with some caution. 

Footnote: 

1. From what I can tell, most hard core radical right politics sites block commenters like myself who post content that contradicts false fact assertions or clearly flawed reasoning. It is often fairly easy to find and cite evidence that rebuts false fact assertions. It usually takes significantly more time and effort to rebut flawed reasoning, i.e., intentionally misleading motivated reasoning. In retaliation for posting truth and sound reasoning, I’ve been blocked and cannot comment at multiple big fascist right sites including Daily Wire and Breitbart. Before I was blocked, my comments that contradicted lies tended to generate the most responses and the most emotional responses by people who disliked hearing that they were being lied to. 

Early on (before ~March 2016), fascist right sites allowed links to be in comments. I used links to cite to evidence that rebutted lies and crackpot reasoning. But over time, sites used links to hold inconvenient comments in moderation, allegedly to look for spam, but most often for no reason. Inconvenient comments with links in them were destined to never be seen. That made it a little harder to rebut lies, but significantly harder to rebut crackpot reasoning. 

But even that level of free speech censoring wasn’t enough. In time, radical right sites decided they needed to flat out block people like me from making any comments. No reason was ever given. Based on what WaPo is reporting here, it may be the case that, despite what appeared to be no impact from people posting truth and sound reasoning, maybe there was some impact. Maybe some people who trusted those sites gained some awareness that they were possibly being lied to or crackpotted on (misled). That would be consistent with sites like Daily Wire and Breitbart shifting somewhat from heavy reliance on flat out lies to more reliance on misleading motivated reasoning as WaPo is reporting now.

Maybe, just maybe, people like me who commented in opposition to wanton dark free speech at least for a while were not acting completely in vain. Of course, maybe we didn't have anything to do with this mindset shift, assuming it is real.

Chapter review part 2: The New Right and Racism

The New Right and Racism is chapter 6 of Sarah Posner's 2020 book, Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump. Part one of this chapter review centered mostly on the propaganda, and the racism the modern alt-right and ex-president relies heavily on to foment false beliefs, social discord and distrust, thereby gaining significant public support. 

This 2nd review focuses on the catastrophic failure of the MSM (mainstream media) in this mess, and two matters of moral opinion, (i) the inherent dark mindset that some humans have, arguably from birth, and (ii) how much tolerance for ignorance and acceptance of propaganda lies should people of good will in a secular democracy have for a lethal threat in their midst.

The MSM

The American people are largely ignorant of what the alt-right and New Right are and stand for. Most of the American people have little or no idea of what Christian nationalism is or the history of the New Right and alt-right since the 1950s. On these issues, the MSM deserves a grade of F-, if that grade exists If not, a grade of F will have to do. IMO, that conclusion isn't a close call. It’s brain dead simple.

Posner mentions a couple of examples of ignorant, deceived MSM complicity. 

First and foremost is the Washington Times (WT). Assuming one can call it part of the MSM, a debatable proposition, that propaganda paper is solidly New Right. It tends to be deceptively described as an American conservative daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., or something bland like that. That is a bald faced lie of omission. For years, the WT employed the extreme racist Samuel Francis (1923-1994) as a syndicated columnist. As mentioned in part 1 of this chapter review, Francis is the racist hater who wrote in favor of dictatorship and justified violence by hurt delicate fascist feelings to get satisfaction, e.g., by attacking civil liberties. 

Also included in the list of incompetent MSM outlets are the Washington Post and New York Times.[1] Both of those boobs published and praised some of the later New Right propaganda and saw it as something new and worthy of consideration in American politics. Those idiots had no idea that they were praising fascist racist propaganda. They get a well-deserved F- on this issue for failing to inform the American people  of what they were in the midst of and being deceived by. To this day, most Americans are mostly or completely  unaware of what Christian nationalism is, what its leaders stand for, and how powerful and hateful it is right now.

The inherent human dark mindset

 As best I can tell, a significant proportion (sometimes majority? usually majority?) of modern humans in a culture, a nation, a group or a tribe are born with brains that develop into openness to beliefs in unpleasant ideas, including openness to and embrace of racism and the psychologically comforting lies of demagogues. This seems to be inherent in the human condition that evolution conferred. Erich Fromm focused on this in his 1941 book Escape from Freedom. There, Fromm argued that many people simply cannot handle democracy and freedom due to its inherent complexity and ambiguity. They psychologically need an escape from the burdens and ambiguities of pluralistic freedom.

In my opinion, the New Right and now the alt-right reflect this ever-present aspect of the human condition. It provides a plausible at least partial rationale for why democracies and pluralism are fragile and prone to fall to tyrants and demagogues despite their typical cruelty and lies.

How tolerant should pro-truth and pro-reason patriots be?

Once upon a time, one observer was alleged to have commented on the human condition, saying something about like this: “If a person’s paycheck depends on them not understanding something, it is damn hard to get them to understand.” There is truth in that, but the observation is too narrow. A more encompassing truth is this: If a person’s paycheck, self-esteem, tribe loyalty, self-identity or ideology depends on them not understanding something, it is damn hard to get them to understand, and if they are members of a cult is it essentially impossible to get them to understand.

Most rank and file voters who vote for most modern Republicans probably do not understand what they are voting for. Their paychecks, self-esteem, cult loyalty and whatnot keep them from seeing. Their minds are trapped and blinded. They cannot see.

Questions:

Does the MSM deserve an F for its failure to adequately report on the New Right and now alt-right, or are the American people reasonably well-informed? Does economic fear keep the MSM from dealing with this competently? If not that, then what?

How much tolerance for that should there be from people who mostly see and accept the alt-right propaganda? Does it matter that those people are often or usually quite intolerant of others they disagree with? Does it matter that they often (usually?) reject differing opinions out of hand, no matter how respectfully they are presented?

Footnote: 

1. In 1986, the Washington Post published an essay by the hard core racist Paul Weyrich that argued for a moderate new trend he called cultural conservatism. He called that “the most important political idea” of the times. It was pure propaganda. Weyrich was astute and understood it would take time to bamboozle the press. He commented that reporters would need to be “spoon fed these ideas over and over again” before New Right propaganda started to gain traction. The bamboozled boobs at the New York Times gushed in a 1987 opinion piece that Weyrich’s drivel might be, as Posner described it, “ushering in a new era of conservative compassion and service to others.” What a load of rot from buffaloed fools.

A little Sunday science pleasure/torture for the right/wrong person

Taking a much-needed mental break from politics, what do you think about “reality?”  Nebulous question, I grant you. 😁 But more specifically, I’m wondering, is math just one property of reality?  Or is math one and the same with what we think of as reality? Yes, a question right down my alley, and one that is being hotly debated in the science world.

From the World Science Festival (begin viewing at the 1:14:18 mark):

 

 

 

So, is a cucumber, with all its mathematical properties, potentially a Ferrari given a different math structure/configuration?  Is a tree just numbers? 

Task: Argue your POV: That reality IS only math *or* That reality IS NOT only math.

If you see reality as NOT only math (but more), name something, anything, whose properties (at its most fundamental) cannot be described in mathematical terms ...*and*... what precludes that something, making it stand above/outside of math.  IOW, justify your answer.  Any takers here?

(While I'm hoping for it, I'm not expecting much of a turnout here. 😉  That's fine. If it's not your thing, it's not your thing.  No problem.)

Chapter review: The New Right and Racism

The New Right and Racism is chapter 6 of Sarah Posner's 2020 book, Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump. This chapter summarizes the recent, frightening history of the intense racism, racist propaganda and revisionist history that is a major driver of the modern New Right political movement, now sometimes called the alt-right. The movement is firmly grounded in lies and sophisticated emotional manipulation that is arguably second to none in human history. In large part, this chapter is about the stunning power of dark free speech and its ability to create faux realities in people’s minds based on lies, emotional appeals to base instincts (especially racism) and crackpot conspiracies.

At the end of the chapter, Posner briefly touches on the influence of the ex-president. She argues that he and his rhetoric saved the alt-right from a slow march into oblivion. He did that by normalizing white nationalism and making its alleged but false grievances appear to be real and, importantly, applicable to tens of millions of average Americans:

“From Bob Whitaker to Sam Francis to William Lind to Donald Trump, the mythic ‘middle American radical’ was honed not only as a political mascot, but as a locus for voter resentment, a rallying cry for cultivating voters who believed that liberalism, pluralism  and civil rights had ripped their heritage and culture right out from under them. The history of the New Right--and its deep and pervasive opposition to civil rights, desegregation and other efforts at ending race discrimination--has been largely forgotten or erased. .... Over the years, the [pro-Trump] coalition yielded to societal pressure to reel in its overt racism and opposition to civil rights advances for black Americans. 

But once Trump brought white nationalism out of the closet, the opposition to civil rights and multiculturalism as elitist ideas tyrannically imposed on white Americans were familiar not only to the hard core white supremacists of the alt-right but to conservatives and paleoconservatives steeped in the same grievances. These voters still harbored resentments that their rights and standing in American society had been somehow diminished by the civil rights movement--and that the ‘mainstream’ conservatism of the two Bush presidencies had not represented their interests, either. Trump didn’t make an entirely new movement out of whole cloth. With his own televangelist gloss, he reactivated the fundamental driving force of the conservative movement of the second half of the twentieth century.”

The propaganda on this point is superb. Before Trump, the alt-right movement had already learned to shift its rhetoric from overt racism to grievance about lost white status and privilege at the hands of hostile outsiders and foreigners. Based on the history, the core New Right grievance was and still is racist. Probably no more than about 2-3% of people who supported the ex-president are aware of most of the real history, instead relying on the deceit, lies and revisionism that the New Right movement routinely relied on in its messaging. Nearly all of those people sincerely believe that they are not racist and that the people they support are not racist. The con job here is breathtaking.

The elites of this movement, reasonably called Christian nationalism, are all aware of what they are doing and why. They are intractably racist but they know how to make it appear that they are not. They work quietly and persistently. In the federal government, they constitute a group of people who can accurately be called the deep state.

Although racism is the focus of this chapter, the Christian nationalist movement is fundamentally a decentralized political movement. The core agenda is accumulation of wealth and power for white elite Christians and elimination of secular government, public education and civil liberties. The vehicle used to gain public support is ruthless dark free speech designed to polarize, divide and foment distrust in society. The tactics are always the same, i.e., heavy reliance on lies, deceit, irrational emotional manipulation and partisan motivated reasoning. Playing on racism is a core element in the New Right propaganda toolbox.

Some of the racist history 

For the most part, the modern timeline goes back to the 1950s and Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education that ordered public school desegregation. Those decisions, later lower court rulings and government implementation of means to desegregate schools and reduce discrimination fueled the New Right movement starting from the 1950s, and it still does in 2021. In particular, school busing and attempts to make school textbooks less white Christian centric and revisionist were powerful drivers of support for the New Right. Fights over public school textbooks are still important to the alt-right. A core idea of the Brown decision is that separate but equal is unconstitutional. The New Right elites reject that reasoning. The rank and file may mostly support it, but the people in power do not.

The New Right led the attacks on all federal efforts to desegregate public schools. Federal actions were portrayed as subverting parental authority, anti-American, anti-Christian and, as Posner puts it, “subversive to the natural order of things.” At least since the 1970s, the New Right quietly exerted significant power through its presence in the federal government: 

“.... people associated with the alt-right [earlier the New Right] have always been a seamless part of official Washington .... Often their presence, and their impact on policy, has gone unnoticed. .... they represented a potent and enduring strand of the American right, one that seethed with resentment over its exile from mainstream conservatism--making it primed to be activated when Trump came on the scene. .... [Despite occasional purges by conservative Republicans] they, and their odious ideas, never went away.”

One federal employee, Robert Whitaker, played a modest role in the rise of the New Right in the 1970s and 1980s. After the 1980s he was publicly quiet until 2006 when he resurfaced as a white supremacist, writing for the neo-Nazi website National Vanguard that immigration was a horror and white people were the victims: “But if I tell that obvious truth about the ongoing program of  genocide against my race, the white race, .... Liberals and respectable conservatives agree that I am a naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews. They say they are anti-racist. What they are is anti-white.” In 2015, Whitaker ran for president for the white supremacist American Freedom Party, but he dropped off the ticket after the AFP endorsed the ex-president in 2016. 

A key New Right propaganda goal was to foment distrust in the federal government and public schools. One New Right propagandist, James McKenna, a lawyer working  at the Heritage Foundation, wrote in a New York Times opinion piece in 1975: “Parents are worried that the schools are turning into big impersonal bureaucracies that do not respond to pressure from the grassroots. People no longer automatically trust the government to know what’s best.”

In congressional testimony in 1974, another New Right propagandist, M. Stanton Evans, chairman of the American Conservative Union, attacked school busing and the core reasoning in the 1954 Brown decision. Evans argued that for school segregation, separate was equal and black children were better off in segregated schools. The Brown holding was that separate was not equal. Evans’ reasoning was cynical and ice-cold. He argued that the liberal education establishment “became convinced and apparently convinced some of our federal judges that Negro children must be taken out of their homes and neighborhoods and placed in an ‘artificial environment’ created by the government, where they will be immersed as fully as possible in an altogether different culture.” Evans complained that liberals believed they had “a commission to tinker around with psychic makeup of the human species.” This line of reasoning, fake concern for black children, was a brilliant bit of propaganda that conflicted with the reasoning in Brown.

A related line of propaganda in New Right opposition to public school desegregation was that it was needed to protect white students. Protect them from what? To protect them from the trauma of personally experiencing the truths in all the white racist myths and lies about black people, including their affinity for crime, their lower IQ and their inherent immoral personal character. New Right propagandist Robert Whitaker wrote: “The proposition that busing promotes brotherhood would be hilarious if it were not so cruel. .... In many  schools children raised in the ghetto are a terror. Hence, for impressionable young white minds, the black beast of the most virulent racist literature seems observed reality.” Now that is real racism. 

The New Right is open to getting its way by violence and dictatorship. An influential New Right propagandist, Sam Francis (1923-1994), wrote about white grievance being rooted “in perceived injustices, unrelieved exploitation by anonymous powers that be, a threatened future, and an insulted past. [It is] therefore understandable that some of its adherents sometimes fantasize that the cartridge box is a not unsatisfactory substitute for the ballot box.” Posner describes Francis as the patron saint of the modern alt-right. On dictatorship, or an imperial presidency Francis wrote : “the adoption of Caesarist tactics [would] reflect the historical pattern by which rising classes ally with an executive power to displace the oligarchy that is entrenched in the intermediate bodies. .... only the Presidency has the power and the resources to begin the process and mobilize popular support for it.” 

No wonder Posner calls Francis the patron saint of the modern alt-right. These people are not just racist. They are also fascist and anti-democratic. Just like Francis was. He clearly foresaw the possibility of a monster like Trump rising to power to save the white race from the alleged oppression of religion, civil liberties and a pluralist society. Posner comments on the Francis legacy: “Francis’s books are regularly read and celebrated by the alt-right and paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan.”

Questions: 

1. It is reasonable to believe that most rank and file Republicans are not themselves racist, but nonetheless support an arguably racist movement that they sincerely believe is fighting against oppression of the white race and/or to preserve or advance white social status, e.g., by attacking civil liberties? 

2. It is reasonable to believe that the New Right and now the alt-right has deceived most Christian evangelicals into strong support for a fascist, racist agenda, regardless of how they view the movement?