Why would it be surprising that people who just spent 4-5 years being indoctrinated in progressive/far left ideas (i.e., college graduates) would vote for Democrats? Of course they're going to do that, and it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with being "better informed." Seems like they were basically groomed for it. Attributing the college grad voting for Democrats to being "more informed" and the non-college educated voting for Republicans to being "less informed" seems very shallowly reasoned and extremely biased. Maybe avoiding the university systems keeps you from getting gaslighted by the extreme left.
This is really good, & I appreciate your posting it. But posting it here is preaching to the choir. This needs to be somewhere where it will get more visibility. It's been years since I subscribed to The Atlantic, but in the old days they would have published something like this (more fully developed, of course). They still might, I don't know. But there, it would get wider attention, & be a big deal^tm.
I'm both upset by this view insofar as it seems to argue for conceding important cultural issues to the right and tentatively quite persuaded that it's insightful and a correct view of how political opinion and affiliation work. It's kind of amazing how rarely I've seen similar arguments amidst the mountain of focus on mis- and disinformation over the past several years. At the very least, that focus deserves to be supplemented by this sort of argument. I wonder how much there are ways to take this argument seriously without moving right on issues where a more left-wing position is correct.
The other thing I'll add is that I do not think there is enough nuance in the "misinformation" discourse to account for "bullshit" (ie. people saying something, often repeatedly, they know is not true because the point is to "get a rise" out of someone...not to convince someone anyone to think you are correct)...and that the "fact checking" model is the exact wrong way to discourage this type of behavior.
The classic example of this is "Birtherism", where it was pretty clear *most* of the high profile folks pushing it forward did not in fact believe it. Even Trump eventually said it was all, indeed, bullshit. And yet, the media incessantly provided Trump (and countless other Republicans) the opportunity to repeat the bullshit because of some "ah HA! gotcha!" sense that it would out them as "stupid"...when in fact all it did was give Republicans an opportunity to "own the Libs" by avoiding to give the press the answer they WANTED and instead obfuscated.
And once it became a "thing" (basically, and inside joke) on the Right to joke about...it got even easier for them.
Had the press never bothered to treat it as a legitimate thing...in all likelihood...it would have not became what it was...
I agree that a lot of the "misinformation" discourse doesn't account for people saying things specifically to be antagonistic. In fact, I can't find the source, but I remember a survey being done on birtherism some years ago where the researchers questioned two groups of self-identified conservatives or Republicans (can't remember the exact framing) about Obama's citizenship and other factual verifiable matters. The control group was just asked the questions while the test group was asked the questions but was told they would receive money (like $10) if they answered the questions correctly. The result was that the test group did much better than the control group on accurately answering the questions, which pretty strongly indicated that most, if not all, conservatives/Republicans know the truth of the situation but say something different in public for the sake of annoying liberals/Democrats.
The thing I used to always ask people when they brought up concerns about "Birtherism" (or using Birtherism as a proxy to talk about the Big Lie) is how many of them *act* like they actually believe it?
If you truly believed a secret Muslim man was elected President of the United States against the rules...would so many folks just be content to complain about it online? Or in regards to January 6th, just mill around the Capital taking pictures with people. How does this explain the extreme difference in action between the Oath Keeper types, etc... the preplanning, etc.
But it's not fun or satisfying to give folks you disagree with that kind of credit, and so people don't... and eventually, you yourself say the lie about how many folks actually bought into "Birtherism" so long you start to believe it...
It doesn't mean you take these issues any less serious...in my opinion, distinguishing proves you take them even MORE serious than most folks.
It hasn't helped that so many political polls go out of there way to craft questions in such a way that it tips the pollsters hand as to what they are "getting at" with the question. If you can tell what a pollster is "getting at" with a question, then it's a lot easier to cut them off at the pass and give a bullshit answer out of spite...and a lot of pollsters do this with conservative poll takers....and then act SHOCKED when they get the answer they were trying to get.
This seems to be another instance of MY telling the Dems to "do politics better." You don't need people to agree with you 100% down the line; you just need their votes.
If most Americans exaggerate the risks of Covid by several orders of magnitude (as they do), wouldn't it be reasonable to suggest that whoever is giving them that idea is spreading dangerous misinformation?
My theory, since the Trump era, has been that so many people on the Left leaned in like Mulders into "disinformation" related narratives as a way to deal with the shock that was Trump winning...
To me, this completely explains polling on Facebook and the moral panic over social media. Essentially, social media panic is the "Reefer Madness" of our Generation now that we have kids.
Literally so many folks own personal interests are tied up in these narratives now that it's hard for us to unseat them, even though we clearly all dealt with this in the earlier ages of Social Media, even into the algprithmic age!
Bottom line is you can't sell people something they don't already want. Believe me, countless companies would love for that to be true. There is so much misunderstanding when it comes to "microtargeting"...that folks look at it as black magick, rather than looking at it as digital advertisers finding a way to NOT waste money advertise to people they don't need to... it's a denominator side innovation allowing folks to spend less and get the same (or more for the same previous investment). There is no special sauce, here.
Matt and many commentators write as though 'misinformation' means 'something that isn't true'. I tend to find that the much more common usage means 'information not consistent with accepted progressive narratives' - i.e. calling something 'misinformation' is not usually a comment on the literal truth value of a statemement.
Basically my view is that the whole 'misinformation' lark is a set up to suport censorship of politically incorrect facts and opinions.
I'd say you're partially incorrect. Some "misinformation" is clearly objectively false (e.g., Barack Obama was born in Kenya) or so wildly improbable and uncorroborated by actual evidence as to not even really be deserving of being treated as an interesting theory (e.g., Hillary Clinton kills and eats children). However, I agree that "misinformation" as slung around in the media and progressive spaces online often also vacuums up matter of pure opinion, different weighting in cost-benefit analysis, tendentious use of academic definitions over more conventional ones, etc.
FWIW, “Centrist” is a slur used by progressives to broadly mean “people that talk a left-wing game but will find common cause for some right-of-center priorities and [in their minds] betray said talk”.
The phenomenon that Matt writes about may fit into the broader problem of the loss of the commonplace definition of words that, as someone who finds humans sufficiently difficult to understand as-is, deeply irks and disorients me.
Instead of coping with reality, progressives convince themselves that their would-be fellow travelers are victims of misinformation, but the first step in that logic-pretzel is redefining dis/misinformation to mean 'information that is used to derive opinions that I disagree with'.
Conservatives are really good at this game; terms like 'CRT' and 'gender' become adjectives to describe emotions of dislike, disgust and fear. Everything becomes an in-joke and no one can communicate with, let alone persuade, people with whom they do not already agree. (I think there was a big Atlantic story everyone was excited about that discussed this dynamic leading to extremists attacking moderates on their own side instead of each other.) A while back my dad signed an email "Let's Go Brandon!". I literally had no idea what he was talking about and wrote back "Who's Brandon?". What an inefficient use of the written word the ensuing back-and-forth was.
A salient example of this phenomenon is 'defund the police'. Its meaning is now supposed to be derived entirely from context and taking it literally is a sign that you are on the wrong side and are irredeemable except that sometimes people angrily assert that it should be taken literally and you're also a bigot if you disagree. (How many fingers, Winston?) It is not the same as virtue-signalling terms like 'pregnant people'. (Also, why are all my colleagues now GLBT advocates—I'm afraid to ask why G got promoted.) And there are many more phrases and words that have become codes to signal tribal identity by producing the correct response phrase.
Orwell describes the power of words and their definition better than I can, but it is easy to see how this kind of thinking primes people to eschew reality entirely. When you encounter an idea, fact, opinion or outcome that you do not like, just redefine the words used to describe it until it comports with your narrative. It's a facile way to avoid hard truths and to feel good about yourself. "They don't dislike my ideas because they are bad and wrong! No, I must steel myself for the righteous battle against misinformation!"
This post conflates misinformation and disinformation. It’s important to understand this distinction if you want to have a coherent conversation on this topic. Anything that is factually incorrect is misinformation. Disinformation is indifferent to the factual accuracy of its claims. It’s the use of information, true false or mixed, to achieve a political goal. A classic example is the scientific and legal campaign of the tobacco industry to spread uncertainty about whether or not smoking increases the risk of lung cancer. They couldn’t claim to have evidence that proved that there was no link but they could fund research for a bunch of other things that might cause lung cancer and to generally generate confusion and exhaustion. Same tactics used by the Kremlin in Russia flooding media with so many lies while claiming that everyone lies all the time and you’re naive if you ever believe anything you hear on the news; this is also what Steve Bannon meant when he referred to the media strategy to “flood the zone with shit.” The goal is less to make people believe a specific thing and more to sow doubt and cynicism. Doubt apathy and cynicism provide fertile ground for merely relying on tribalism and inoculates your followers against taking in any information that might persuade them to turn against you. Disinformation is about intent and generally involves coordination, bots, etc to spread an idea or a framing of a situation.
Tl;dr the makers of the Bible poll probably haven’t read a page of the Bible (or biblical scholarship) in their life and are as ignorant (or more ignorant) than those who understand it through a theist lens.
An incidental note- the poll on the Bible is badly conducted as it allows for 3 options that are all false (or unprovable) by scholarly standards. In fact, anyone who bothered to read even a significant portion of the Bible will immediately realize it’s not a “book” in the modern sense but rather a collection of texts, some composed many centuries apart and in 3 different original languages. While *some* parts can be labeled as “fables” (loosely defined) others are clearly of many other genres including poetry, historiography, and ancient near eastern genres for which there is no good modern equivalent (e.g. Wisdom Literature). While parts of the Bible are certainly mythical/legendary, others offer accounts of genuine historical events, well-corroborated by archaeology and independent written literary and epigraphical sources (e.g much of the books(s) of Kings).
Why would it be surprising that people who just spent 4-5 years being indoctrinated in progressive/far left ideas (i.e., college graduates) would vote for Democrats? Of course they're going to do that, and it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with being "better informed." Seems like they were basically groomed for it. Attributing the college grad voting for Democrats to being "more informed" and the non-college educated voting for Republicans to being "less informed" seems very shallowly reasoned and extremely biased. Maybe avoiding the university systems keeps you from getting gaslighted by the extreme left.
This is really good, & I appreciate your posting it. But posting it here is preaching to the choir. This needs to be somewhere where it will get more visibility. It's been years since I subscribed to The Atlantic, but in the old days they would have published something like this (more fully developed, of course). They still might, I don't know. But there, it would get wider attention, & be a big deal^tm.
I'm both upset by this view insofar as it seems to argue for conceding important cultural issues to the right and tentatively quite persuaded that it's insightful and a correct view of how political opinion and affiliation work. It's kind of amazing how rarely I've seen similar arguments amidst the mountain of focus on mis- and disinformation over the past several years. At the very least, that focus deserves to be supplemented by this sort of argument. I wonder how much there are ways to take this argument seriously without moving right on issues where a more left-wing position is correct.
The other thing I'll add is that I do not think there is enough nuance in the "misinformation" discourse to account for "bullshit" (ie. people saying something, often repeatedly, they know is not true because the point is to "get a rise" out of someone...not to convince someone anyone to think you are correct)...and that the "fact checking" model is the exact wrong way to discourage this type of behavior.
The classic example of this is "Birtherism", where it was pretty clear *most* of the high profile folks pushing it forward did not in fact believe it. Even Trump eventually said it was all, indeed, bullshit. And yet, the media incessantly provided Trump (and countless other Republicans) the opportunity to repeat the bullshit because of some "ah HA! gotcha!" sense that it would out them as "stupid"...when in fact all it did was give Republicans an opportunity to "own the Libs" by avoiding to give the press the answer they WANTED and instead obfuscated.
And once it became a "thing" (basically, and inside joke) on the Right to joke about...it got even easier for them.
Had the press never bothered to treat it as a legitimate thing...in all likelihood...it would have not became what it was...
I agree that a lot of the "misinformation" discourse doesn't account for people saying things specifically to be antagonistic. In fact, I can't find the source, but I remember a survey being done on birtherism some years ago where the researchers questioned two groups of self-identified conservatives or Republicans (can't remember the exact framing) about Obama's citizenship and other factual verifiable matters. The control group was just asked the questions while the test group was asked the questions but was told they would receive money (like $10) if they answered the questions correctly. The result was that the test group did much better than the control group on accurately answering the questions, which pretty strongly indicated that most, if not all, conservatives/Republicans know the truth of the situation but say something different in public for the sake of annoying liberals/Democrats.
The thing I used to always ask people when they brought up concerns about "Birtherism" (or using Birtherism as a proxy to talk about the Big Lie) is how many of them *act* like they actually believe it?
If you truly believed a secret Muslim man was elected President of the United States against the rules...would so many folks just be content to complain about it online? Or in regards to January 6th, just mill around the Capital taking pictures with people. How does this explain the extreme difference in action between the Oath Keeper types, etc... the preplanning, etc.
But it's not fun or satisfying to give folks you disagree with that kind of credit, and so people don't... and eventually, you yourself say the lie about how many folks actually bought into "Birtherism" so long you start to believe it...
It doesn't mean you take these issues any less serious...in my opinion, distinguishing proves you take them even MORE serious than most folks.
It hasn't helped that so many political polls go out of there way to craft questions in such a way that it tips the pollsters hand as to what they are "getting at" with the question. If you can tell what a pollster is "getting at" with a question, then it's a lot easier to cut them off at the pass and give a bullshit answer out of spite...and a lot of pollsters do this with conservative poll takers....and then act SHOCKED when they get the answer they were trying to get.
This seems to be another instance of MY telling the Dems to "do politics better." You don't need people to agree with you 100% down the line; you just need their votes.
If most Americans exaggerate the risks of Covid by several orders of magnitude (as they do), wouldn't it be reasonable to suggest that whoever is giving them that idea is spreading dangerous misinformation?
Who can it possibly be?
My theory, since the Trump era, has been that so many people on the Left leaned in like Mulders into "disinformation" related narratives as a way to deal with the shock that was Trump winning...
To me, this completely explains polling on Facebook and the moral panic over social media. Essentially, social media panic is the "Reefer Madness" of our Generation now that we have kids.
Literally so many folks own personal interests are tied up in these narratives now that it's hard for us to unseat them, even though we clearly all dealt with this in the earlier ages of Social Media, even into the algprithmic age!
Bottom line is you can't sell people something they don't already want. Believe me, countless companies would love for that to be true. There is so much misunderstanding when it comes to "microtargeting"...that folks look at it as black magick, rather than looking at it as digital advertisers finding a way to NOT waste money advertise to people they don't need to... it's a denominator side innovation allowing folks to spend less and get the same (or more for the same previous investment). There is no special sauce, here.
Matt and many commentators write as though 'misinformation' means 'something that isn't true'. I tend to find that the much more common usage means 'information not consistent with accepted progressive narratives' - i.e. calling something 'misinformation' is not usually a comment on the literal truth value of a statemement.
Basically my view is that the whole 'misinformation' lark is a set up to suport censorship of politically incorrect facts and opinions.
I'd say you're partially incorrect. Some "misinformation" is clearly objectively false (e.g., Barack Obama was born in Kenya) or so wildly improbable and uncorroborated by actual evidence as to not even really be deserving of being treated as an interesting theory (e.g., Hillary Clinton kills and eats children). However, I agree that "misinformation" as slung around in the media and progressive spaces online often also vacuums up matter of pure opinion, different weighting in cost-benefit analysis, tendentious use of academic definitions over more conventional ones, etc.
FWIW, “Centrist” is a slur used by progressives to broadly mean “people that talk a left-wing game but will find common cause for some right-of-center priorities and [in their minds] betray said talk”.
Great job, this is one of your best articles yet.
The phenomenon that Matt writes about may fit into the broader problem of the loss of the commonplace definition of words that, as someone who finds humans sufficiently difficult to understand as-is, deeply irks and disorients me.
Instead of coping with reality, progressives convince themselves that their would-be fellow travelers are victims of misinformation, but the first step in that logic-pretzel is redefining dis/misinformation to mean 'information that is used to derive opinions that I disagree with'.
Conservatives are really good at this game; terms like 'CRT' and 'gender' become adjectives to describe emotions of dislike, disgust and fear. Everything becomes an in-joke and no one can communicate with, let alone persuade, people with whom they do not already agree. (I think there was a big Atlantic story everyone was excited about that discussed this dynamic leading to extremists attacking moderates on their own side instead of each other.) A while back my dad signed an email "Let's Go Brandon!". I literally had no idea what he was talking about and wrote back "Who's Brandon?". What an inefficient use of the written word the ensuing back-and-forth was.
A salient example of this phenomenon is 'defund the police'. Its meaning is now supposed to be derived entirely from context and taking it literally is a sign that you are on the wrong side and are irredeemable except that sometimes people angrily assert that it should be taken literally and you're also a bigot if you disagree. (How many fingers, Winston?) It is not the same as virtue-signalling terms like 'pregnant people'. (Also, why are all my colleagues now GLBT advocates—I'm afraid to ask why G got promoted.) And there are many more phrases and words that have become codes to signal tribal identity by producing the correct response phrase.
Orwell describes the power of words and their definition better than I can, but it is easy to see how this kind of thinking primes people to eschew reality entirely. When you encounter an idea, fact, opinion or outcome that you do not like, just redefine the words used to describe it until it comports with your narrative. It's a facile way to avoid hard truths and to feel good about yourself. "They don't dislike my ideas because they are bad and wrong! No, I must steel myself for the righteous battle against misinformation!"
This post conflates misinformation and disinformation. It’s important to understand this distinction if you want to have a coherent conversation on this topic. Anything that is factually incorrect is misinformation. Disinformation is indifferent to the factual accuracy of its claims. It’s the use of information, true false or mixed, to achieve a political goal. A classic example is the scientific and legal campaign of the tobacco industry to spread uncertainty about whether or not smoking increases the risk of lung cancer. They couldn’t claim to have evidence that proved that there was no link but they could fund research for a bunch of other things that might cause lung cancer and to generally generate confusion and exhaustion. Same tactics used by the Kremlin in Russia flooding media with so many lies while claiming that everyone lies all the time and you’re naive if you ever believe anything you hear on the news; this is also what Steve Bannon meant when he referred to the media strategy to “flood the zone with shit.” The goal is less to make people believe a specific thing and more to sow doubt and cynicism. Doubt apathy and cynicism provide fertile ground for merely relying on tribalism and inoculates your followers against taking in any information that might persuade them to turn against you. Disinformation is about intent and generally involves coordination, bots, etc to spread an idea or a framing of a situation.
A more recent example: The constant framing of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law as the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Copium
Yet another form of Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSrI5HOd_RE
Tl;dr the makers of the Bible poll probably haven’t read a page of the Bible (or biblical scholarship) in their life and are as ignorant (or more ignorant) than those who understand it through a theist lens.
An incidental note- the poll on the Bible is badly conducted as it allows for 3 options that are all false (or unprovable) by scholarly standards. In fact, anyone who bothered to read even a significant portion of the Bible will immediately realize it’s not a “book” in the modern sense but rather a collection of texts, some composed many centuries apart and in 3 different original languages. While *some* parts can be labeled as “fables” (loosely defined) others are clearly of many other genres including poetry, historiography, and ancient near eastern genres for which there is no good modern equivalent (e.g. Wisdom Literature). While parts of the Bible are certainly mythical/legendary, others offer accounts of genuine historical events, well-corroborated by archaeology and independent written literary and epigraphical sources (e.g much of the books(s) of Kings).
Yes thank you!
Well said, Matt Yglesias!