The big lesson of 2020 is that everything keeps getting more dishonest.
by Farhad Manjoo
...I spent a couple of hours recently chatting with Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Donovan is a pioneering scholar of misinformation and media manipulation — the way that activists, extremists and propagandists surf currents in our fragmented, poorly moderated media ecosystem to gain attention and influence society.
Donovan’s research team studies online lies the way crash-scene investigators study aviation disasters. They meticulously take apart specific hoaxes, conspiracy theories, viral political memes, harassment campaigns and other toxic online campaigns in search of the tactics that made each one explode into the public conversation...
Donovan worries about two factors in particular. One is the social isolation caused by the pandemic. Lots of Americans are stuck at home, many economically bereft and cut off from friends and relatives who might temper their passions — a perfect audience for peddlers of conspiracy theories.
Her other major worry is the conspiracy lollapalooza known as QAnon. It’s often short-handed the way Savannah Guthrie did at her town hall takedown of Donald Drumpf last week — as a nutty conspiracy theory in which a heroic Drumpf is prosecuting a secret war against a satanic pedophile ring of lefty elites.
But that undersells QAnon’s danger. To people who have been “Q-pilled,” QAnon plays a much deeper role in their lives; it has elements of a support group, a political party, a lifestyle brand, a collective delusion, a religion, a cult, a huge multiplayer game and an extremist network.
Donovan thinks QAnon represents a new, flexible infrastructure for conspiracy. QAnon has origins in a tinfoil-hat story about a D.C.-area pizza shop, but over the years it has adapted to include theories about the “deep state” and the Mueller probe, Jeffrey Epstein, and a wild variety of misinformation about face masks, miracle cures, and other hoaxes regarding the coronavirus. QAnon has been linked to many instances of violence, and law enforcement and terrorism researchers discuss it as a growing security threat.
“We now have a densely networked conspiracy theory that is extendible, adaptable, flexible and resilient to takedown,” Donovan said of QAnon. It’s a very internet story, analogous to the way Amazon expanded from an online bookstore into a general-purpose system for selling anything to anyone.
Facebook and YouTube this month launched new efforts to take down QAnon content, but Q adherents have often managed to evade deplatforming by softening and readjusting their messages. Recently, for instance, QAnon has adopted slogans like “Save the Children” and “Child Lives Matter,” and it seems to be appealing to anti-vaxxers and wellness moms.
QAnon is also participatory, and, in an uncertain time, it may seem like a salvation. People “are seeking answers and they’re finding a very receptive community in QAnon,” Donovan said.
This is a common theme in disinformation research: What makes digital lies so difficult to combat is not just the technology used to spread them, but also the nature of the societies they’re targeting, including their political cultures. Donovan compares QAnon to the Rev. Charles Coughlin, the priest whose radio show spread anti-Semitism in the Depression-era United States. Stopping Coughlin’s hate took a concerted effort, involving new regulations for radio broadcasters and condemnation of Coughlin by the Catholic Church.
Stopping QAnon will be harder; Coughlin was one hatemonger with a big microphone, while QAnon is a complex, decentralized, deceptive network of hate. But the principle remains: Combating the deception that has overrun public discourse should be a primary goal of our society. Otherwise, America ends in lies.
Farhad Manjoo, nyt
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How to Talk to Friends Who Share Conspiracy Theories
Increasingly, friends, colleagues and readers share the same story with me: Online, somebody they know and love has stumbled into the treacherous world of online conspiracy theories and, in some cases, might not even know it. I’m often asked: How do you talk to people you care about who might be on the precipice of or headed down the conspiratorial rabbit hole?
It’s a question without an easy answer, but one we need to ask with increasing urgency. I decided to ask some scholars and researchers about best practices. Their answers are helpful — but more than that, they illustrate the depth of the problem. Conspiracy theories (like Pizzagate and now QAnon, anti-vaccine claims, disinformation around the coronavirus suggesting the virus was engineered in a laboratory) are a chronic condition that will long outlive the 2020 election. Given our reliance on social platforms to connect and process news, we need a way to manage their inevitable presence in our lives, rather than naïvely hold out hope for a magical cure.
Reminder: This advice pertains to friends or relatives with whom you are already close and who are not demonstrating unstable or violent behavior. It’s important to exercise restraint and good judgment in all cases.
Ask where the information is coming from.
Whitney Phillips, a communications scholar at Syracuse University who studies misinformation, rhetoric and information systems, suggested talking about the way the internet works.... (continues)
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