‘Pizzagate,’ fact checking, and the weaponisation of social media
Friday, 28 July, 2023
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Marco Bastos (above) is the University College Dublin Ad Astra Fellow at the School of Information and Communication Studies. He is the lead investigator in the Twitter-funded project investigating echo chambers and political polarisation in the aftermath of the Brexit vote. He is also the author ofSpatializing Social Media - Social Networks Online and Offline, published by Routledge in 2021.
Propaganda has been around for centuries. But its modern iteration - disinformation - is a far more recent buzzword.
“I think 2016 was a watershed moment because of the Brexit vote in the UK and the election of Donald J. Trump as a US President,” says Marco Bastos. “I think that's when folks basically opened up their eyes and said, ‘Well, there's a problem here. And this problem has been fuelled to a large extent by the weaponisation of social media platforms.’”
The purpose of publishing misleading, biased or untrue information is “usually to sway public opinion. Those who are orchestrating or managing a disinformation campaign - or an ‘influence operation’, to use the terminology of the intelligence community - usually have a fairly tangible outcome that they want to achieve, whether it's to sway an election or change opinions about a given policy or a candidate”.
‘Conversion’, however, is not easy to achieve, “because people have their own biases, their own personal histories, and they don't usually buy into anything new”. Convincing a Democrat to vote Republican in an American election - or vice versa - is notoriously difficult.
“But you might not need to convince people to vote for a given candidate. Sometimes it is enough to muddle things. You could just disenfranchise them, or make them feel they are not represented. If people can be convinced not to vote, we are already achieving substantive changes in the political sphere.”
To help clear the muddied waters of public discourse is the fact-checking industry. This work is carried out by press organisations, NGOs, or third-party programmes hired by the social media platforms themselves.
Fact-checkers have “the gargantuan task of purging misinformation” from the internet. Though fact-checking is an important tool in the fight against so-called alternative facts, “the problem is that it wasn't designed to scale to the magnitude of disinformation” out there.
Particularly in the face of wild conspiracy theories. Marco gives the example of ‘Pizzagate,’ the viral claim during the 2016 US Presidential election campaign that senior Democrats were running a global child-trafficking ring from the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington DC.
Despite many journalists and fact-checkers - and the DC police - debunking this rumour, it became “ground zero for Qanon,” the pervasive right-wing organisation that believes Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business, and the media.
“Despite the extensive fact-checks, we still had this individual who went with a rifle to the restaurant to liberate the children he was still convinced were captive there,” says Marco. “Some of these guys are completely inoculated against fact-checking. I think the problem with this framework is the idea that people can be convinced of one thing or another based on rational deliberation. And I think it's not about that. You're not operating in the same framework as they are.”
Marco does like to believe that some people - if not all - may have had their minds changed by the fact checkers.
But these days having “consensus deliberation about any hot topic” has become “increasingly more difficult.”
“We were living with cultural warfare between the liberal left and the far right. There is an outright cultural war going on for the past couple of years and it has reached some sort of climax.”
A good example of this was the storming of the Capitol building in Washington DC in January 2021 by Trump voters seeking to overturn President Biden’s election victory.
“The accelerating polarisation in the US really is poisonous. It is eroding the basis of democracy in the US to the point now where we don’t know if election results will be respected. That is a major blow to democracy.”
Social divisions were also stoked by the Covid-19 anti-vaccination movement, which ranged from individuals exercising bodily autonomy to sharing unfounded conspiracy theories about the jab itself containing a sinister microchip.
The disastrous impact of disinformation is also playing out in the recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
“Truth is the first casualty of war,” quotes Marco. “But the moment you have attrition warfare it becomes almost unreasonable to expect factual, objective information.”
All the same, Ukraine, “at least from our perspective, has a far greater commitment to objective truth and reality than the Russian side, which at this point is converging with almost fanatical magical realism.”
What the world needs now to restore cohesion is what Marco calls a “total social fact” or a shared objective that renders our current differences less consequential.
“You can reset the population to forget their grievances and come together, as they did, for example, with the moon landings in the US or the Good Friday Agreement in Ireland. You don’t have to convince people to change who they are or what they believe. You’re convincing everyone that something else is more important - and we all decide to move on.”
Listen to the (opens in a new window)podcast.
This article was originally published on 26 April 2022.