← Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Election Meltdown, Professor Brendan Nyhan
00:14:15
How disinformation undermines elections.
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- [00:02]
A
This is Dahlia Lithwick. I'm host of this the Amicus podcast and co host with Rick Hassan of our very special Election Meltdown series, which we've just wrapped. If you enjoyed this series, I want to let you know that there's more of it. We did extended and bonus interviews with Dale Ho, director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, professor of Government at Dartmouth, Brendan Nyhan, Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap, and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. I think they really give the fullest scope of all the issues that we have covered in this series, and all of them are available right now. If you sign up for Slate plus, it's only $35 for the first year and you'll be helping support the work we do here at Amicus and at Slate. So head over to slate.com amicusplus to sign up now. You don't want to miss out on these bonus episodes. And in fact, we have a preview of one of those conversations right here where Brendan Nyhan expl why he's more concerned about disinformation that originates within the United States than online influence campaigns coming from overseas.
- [01:10]
B
The 2016 election was notable in a number of respects. One was the unprecedented volume of misinformation and the role played by social media. So I want to break that down. The Russian interference effort was unprecedented in how brazen and open it was and and seem to have succeeded at gaining widespread distribution via Facebook and Twitter to many Americans. So the Russian bots and trolls and all the different ways that the Russian government effort tried to reach Americans was successful in the sense that millions of Americans had at least some contact with content that was produced by the Russian government or people associated with it. And the goal typically was to divide Americans. In some cases they promoted mis and disinformation, but in other cases they simply highlighted real stories or real issues that divided Americans or that they thought might polarize us against each other. The question, though, is what effect that effort had. To answer that question, it's necessary to think about all the different kinds of information that people are exposed to during a campaign. While it's true that millions of Americans were exposed to content that was created or amplified by Russian bots and trolls, the best of our research suggested that's a tiny percentage of the information that anyone was exposed to during the campaign. And everything we know about campaign communication suggests that those brief, momentary exposures are very unlikely to have a lasting effect on people's vote choice or decision to turn out. We can't rule out very elaborate stories about tens of thousands of votes in pivotal states in the upper Midwest. But there's no convincing evidence that the Russian interference effort changed the election outcome. The effects were probably quite minimal. In some ways, the most powerful effect of the Russian effort was the way it's divided our country against itself in the period since. In that sense, the Russian interference being detected may have been more of a feature than a bug. In other words, it may have served Russia's interests more to be detected with this relatively low cost, low quality, ham handed operation than to have done something more sophisticated and covert. Being detected created this ongoing controversy that has divided us in the years since and in part helped to undermine the legitimacy of the current president.
- [04:03]
C
Where does the Russian misinformation fit into misinformation more generally in 2016?
- [04:08]
B
So in 2016, the Russian misinformation was one part of a kind of torrent of misinformation that was directed at Americans, and it seems to have made up a very small part. The same is true for the so called fake news websites that have received so much coverage in the period since the 2016 election. Those untrustworthy websites, which frequently published false or unsupported claims about the candidates and about contemporary politics, were, like the Russian content, a tiny percentage of most people's information diets. So it seems as though their effects were quite limited. Both represent very worrisome precedents. If we don't act to address those concerns, they could become much worse. If the social media platforms gave a big base for fake news entrepreneurs to do even more in 2020, that would be bad. If Russia scaled up its efforts in 2020, that would be bad. But in terms of 2016, the critical point to remember is that mainstream news still was the primary source of information for the overwhelming majority of Americans. And anyone following the campaign therefore was getting most of their misinformation from domestic political actors, from the conventional campaign itself, and most notably from, from the candidate who went on to eventually win the presidency, Donald Trump, who has engaged in an unprecedented level of misinformation since the very beginning of his campaign. And there was almost no way to avoid being exposed to it. If you follow the campaign at all.
- [05:47]
C
And how would you put, say, Fox News in here compared to, in terms of its influence compared to the influence of Russia?
- [05:53]
B
These comparisons are very difficult to make without the kind of granular data that's not totally available to us. And I think it's fair to say that more Americans are regularly exposed to misinformation via Fox than were regularly exposed to misinformation via, say, Russian bots and trolls. That's not to say that everything on Fox is misinformation, of course, but it does amplify certain kinds of misinformation, particularly in the primetime shows that are the most partisan. And in that way it plays a critical role in the misinformation delivery mechanisms that are most important on the right now.
- [06:31]
C
One of the things that you've been saying a lot, and I've heard from Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citrone, is that one of the biggest dangers of misinformation is not that people will necessarily believe the lies, but that they'll start disbelieving the truth. I think they call this the liar's dividend. Is there good evidence that this is a problem, that we're starting to worry about all of these things?
- [06:55]
B
I don't know of good evidence to support that claim in contemporary American politics, but I'm worried about it. Observers of authoritarian and semi authoritarian countries have often commented on the way that their information environments are polluted in politics these days. The fear is less about propaganda that convinces everybody to believe it and more about the way in which it degrades the information environment and causes people to give up on figuring out what is true. That pattern seems to have recurred in enough countries that the historical evidence indicates we should be worried about it happening here. I don't know, though, that there's convincing quantitative evidence of that process happening, for instance, since 2015 and 2016 in the way that story might suggest. I think it's more of a possibility than a documented phenomenon, but it is very worrisome.
- [07:54]
C
So in 2017, in the US Senate race in Alabama, we saw some Americans trying to emulate the Russian tactics, particularly Democrats supporting Doug Jones, although Jones himself was not involved. There were these efforts to also ham handed to make it look like the Russians were involved. Do you think those were successful efforts? And how would we know if they were or weren't? You know, that was a pretty close race. As Alabama Senate races go.
- [08:19]
B
I don't think we know how successful they were. It's very difficult to evaluate the success of campaign influence efforts that take place via Facebook because the platform is so closed and that problem's become worse since 2016. The project was a failure insofar as the people who funded it and even some of the operatives who carried it out have since repudiated it. I think that style of campaign has at least been stigmatized. I don't think we know however, how effective it really was. And it does highlight the risk that domestic political actors can use some of the same tactics that the Russians have used. And that really complicates some of the questions we're dealing with here. There's a very strong consensus that foreign actors have no place in our elections. But the questions become much more complicated when it comes to people who are part of our political process but are stretching the boundaries of conventional politics. And our legal and regulatory system hasn't fully caught up with that problem. And I think our kind of media ecosystem hasn't either. The platforms certainly have been caught off guard again and again by these sorts of incidents, and there's no reason to think that they will catch the next one in time. You can't rerun elections, or at least you couldn't, without great damage to the legitimacy of our democracy. So these kind of last minute sneak attacks remain a worrisome threat.
- [09:53]
C
So now the big thing that people are talking about for 2020 are deepfakes and other manipulated video and audio. Do you think they present a greater danger in the sense that we're seeing things with our own eyes and maybe it's harder to determine what counts as misinformation.
- [10:08]
B
I'm in the camp that the threat from deepfakes is so far overhyped. We have seen no successful mainstream deepfake having an important effect on national politics here in the United States or really anywhere else in the world. Most of the effort in that area is devoted to pornography and isn't being used in the political sphere. The threat, I think, is more from what have been called cheap fakes, the kinds of low quality distortions of video and audio that take relatively little skill to create and can therefore be created at a large enough scale that some of them may break through and get traction before they're detected and addressed. Right. So examples include a video of Nancy Pelosi that was altered to make her look like she was drunk that spread in the the spring of 2019, as well as a video of CNN correspondent Jim Acosta that was manipulated to make him look like he was pushing a White House staff member or intern, which took place in November 2018. So those are two examples where these low quality video manipulations spread widely that didn't take almost any sophistication at all to create.
- [11:29]
C
Who are the people most likely to be swayed by misinformation? Does it matter by age or by political party? Does it matter by education? Do we know anything about. Because there's so much micro targeting now, you can figure out who you want to send your messages to. What do we know about those who are mostly susceptible, and what does it tell us about strategies to counteract misinformation?
- [12:00]
B
I think the ideal target audience for political misinformation is your core supporters, the people who have the strongest reason to believe some misinformation about the other side, which is almost always negative, the misinformation that gets the most traction or is overwhelmingly about why the other side is bad, lying, evil, malevolent, et cetera. And your core supporters are going to be most likely to believe that and to help amplify it via their own social networks, word of mouth, and so forth. That means that the ecosystems that committed partisans live in are an important kind of breeding ground for misinformation that may disseminate from the kind of digital fever swamps out into the mainstream. And it's important to address misinformation at that stage before it spreads more widely. And we've seen this transmission process again and again as fringe claims move into mainstream discourse, whether it was the birther myth or claiming that Barack Obama was a Muslim or or the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Again and again, these kinds of claims have started with a group of fringe hardcore believers and then have been amplified by elites and refracted out into the mainstream.
- [13:31]
A
To listen to the rest of the conversations and all of the bonus interviews that we did for this series, Sign up for Slate Plus@slate.com amicusplus thank you.