This is part three in a series of posts about disinformation and propaganda. If you missed the previous ones, you can find them here and here.
A few years ago, when I was working as an environmental reporter, a press release arrived in my inbox touting a shocking new study that had found bacteria—gasp!— in reusable grocery bags, including the gross-sounding coliform variety.
My reporter brain immediately had questions. Who funded the study? (The plastics industry, naturally.) What was the sample size? (84 bags in one grocery store parking lot.) Isn’t there bacteria pretty much everywhere on earth? (Yes, with the exception of the crater of an actively erupting volcano.) Isn’t coliform bacteria the kind that makes you sick? (Turns out that most varieties of coliform bacteria are harmless and the study didn’t specify which ones were found.) Looked at critically, the study was a nothing-burger. There was no evidence that anybody had actually gotten sick from a reusable grocery bag.
Nevertheless, the study yielded plenty of scary headlines in the popular press. And it continues to do so, recirculating periodically with the help of a new “study” or a new industry-sponsored front group.
This is classic corporate propaganda, designed to deceive a public not well versed in science or statistics.1 And while the study’s fine-print conclusion was actually just a recommendation to occasionally wash your reusable bags, the PR machine that distributed the press release knew that most people only read the headlines.
Disgust is such a powerful human emotion that the mere mention of a phrase like “coliform bacteria” can be enough to make you choose plastic over reusable bags. In fact, while writing this paragraph — which was, to be clear, about how bogus that study was— I got up and put my reusable grocery bags in the washing machine. Better safe than sorry, right?
Which brings me to the question of doubt.
Doubt is the propagandist’s most powerful weapon. Because how can you know for sure that your grocery bag is safe? Who can you trust to tell you the truth? If you’re not already firmly Team Reusable or Team Plastic, where are you going to turn for information? After all, doesn’t everyone—plastics pushers and environmentalists alike— have an agenda? And, if the truth is unknowable and the experts are lying, then why not just do the easiest thing and ask for a plastic bag?
Doubt and Certainty are the twin pillars of disinformation. They work in tandem.
I wrote about Certainty last week, particularly the way that adopting a predefined narrative leads to confirmation bias and the rejection of information that doesn’t fit the story. Certainty tends to constellate around topics that have a strong moral component, like abortion or the war in Gaza or crime and punishment.
But Certainty is not the only aim of disinformation. As dangerous as it is to believe everything your side tells you, it can be equally dangerous to settle into a cynical stance in which truth doesn’t exist or can never be known. Once you conclude that there are no reliable sources of information, the only logical place to go is apathy. Which, if you hadn’t noticed, is where many Americans have settled.
Zeynep Tufekci, the Princeton Sociologist who has written extensively about the science and public health messaging around COVID-19, recently wrote in the New York Times (gift link) about the ways that falsehoods, misrepresentations, and a general lack of transparency from public health officials ended up undermining trust in science in ways that are still being felt. In particular, she cited officials’ reluctance to admit that the virus was transmitted through the air rather than on surfaces.
If the government misled people about how Covid is transmitted, why would Americans believe what it says about vaccines or bird flu or H.I.V.? How should people distinguish between wild conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies?
“Misinformation is not something that can be overcome solely by spelling out facts just the right way,” she concluded. “Defeating it requires earning and keeping the public’s trust.” Without that trust, researchers have found, people won’t get life-saving vaccines or comply with simple public safety recommendations like mask-wearing.
Trust in institutions is key to a functioning democracy. People have to believe that elections aren’t rigged, for one thing. They also have to trust that other institutions—schools, libraries, courts, public health officials—generally work in the public’s interest. They have to believe that local governments wouldn’t be banning plastic bags if reusable ones really made you sick, for example, that teachers and librarians aren’t trying to indoctrinate their children, that health officials are committed to protecting the public, and that no one is above the law.
Once that trust is undermined, truth becomes a contested space. None of us has the education, training, or time to determine the veracity of everything we read, so we have to rely on someone else’s expertise. Disinformation operates, in part, by eroding confidence in non-partisan experts like civil servants, journalists, scientists, and teachers, thus making people more likely to swallow the biased narratives offered by partisan sources, much of it spread on social media. As one academic article on online partisanship explains:
Social media offer[s] a direct connection to people and thus allows for the spread of fragmented ideas such as populism to circumvent journalistic gatekeepers. In this way populists can present uncontested or unvetted ideas directly to their audience and articulate their ideology (Engesser et al., 2017). . . It is within this landscape that traditional media are forced to line up with polarized content in new media in order to keep their audience, while users are caught in the middle or forced to take a side.
Analysis of the disinformation campaigns bankrolled by Russia has found that it has two goals. The first is to influence the outcome in favor of their preferred candidates (particularly Donald Trump). The second is to sow discord and division and undermine trust in democratic institutions. The Kremlin uses bots and troll farms to amplify or create extremist positions on multiple sides of an issue so that any public discussion of the topic devolves into a series of shouting matches and citizens of all political stripes feel that the government is against them and can’t be trusted. As a NATO report on Kremlin disinformation explains:
Unlike during the Soviet era, Russian disinformation aimed at the West does not seek to promote the superiority of its authoritarian model or the merits of its policies. Rather, its primary objective is to weaken democratic societies and increase Russia’s relative power. To this aim, Russian disinformation actors exploit existing fault lines in Western societies, such as ethnic, linguistic, regional, social and historical divisions, and amplify divisive narratives.
Cynicism is often the default stance in authoritarian societies where experts and authorities can’t be trusted. But it’s also an increasing byproduct of our hyper-partisan and information-saturated environment. Talking with voters in California and Nevada during the past few election cycles, I’ve heard many variations of statements like “All anybody does is yell, so I just tune the whole thing out,” or “I don’t trust either side, so I don’t bother voting.”
The best way to destroy a democracy, in other words, is through a mixture of Doubt and Certainty. The more loud and polarized the Certain are, the more apathetic and passive the Doubtful will be. And in the end, both the Certain and Doubtful will have concluded that the system is broken beyond repair.
What’s the solution? I’ll talk a little about media literacy next week. But in the meantime, enjoy this one-minute video from Amplify, a voter mobilization group, which offers a pretty good antidote to the problem of disinformation-related apathy.
With a sigh,
Dashka
This is one reason why I wish high schools and colleges valued statistics as much as they value calculus. Sure, calculus is important for engineers, but understanding statistics is important for everyone. If there’s one thing every citizen of a democracy should know, it’s how to read a study to determine whether its conclusions are supported by the evidence. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Looking forward to next week's media literacy post. As a K12 educator I know we have to get the public educated about media disinformation and misinformation. Formal curriculum should be adopted, but it's not! Lobby, lobby, lobby!
Great analysis. The bag example is priceless.