Posted on 04/05/2024 1:20:59 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Twelve years ago, Sasha Issenberg published “The Victory Lab,” and revealed how campaigns were using new data collection and social science advances to manipulate the electorate. “The Lie Detectives,” his new book, is an odd sort of sequel — a reported look at the battle against online “disinformation,” as seen through panicky Democrats and the political operatives that they hired after the 2016 election, a loss they blamed on online lies. Issenberg sat down with Americana to talk about it. This is an edited transcript of the conversation.
Americana: How do you actually define disinformation?
Sasha Issenberg: It’s sort of an unhelpful term at this point — and yes, it’s on the cover of my book. There’s a technical distinction that experts make, which is that disinformation is created intentionally with the intention to deceive. Misinformation, which encompasses disinformation, is just something that is factually inaccurate. I think that can be a useful distinction for academic study. It’s not a terribly useful distinction for practitioners.
When you dig in with the people working on what counter-disinformation tactics look like for a campaign, they don’t care about the truth or falsity of what they’re up against. They’re concerned about negative attacks that will damage their candidate, which, to be fair, is what every campaign ever has been worried about. What’s new is a situation where your opposition is not your opponent. Your opposition is operating under an entirely different set of constraints. The core political shift is towards a sort of decentralized media that is free from the normal constraints that defined the 20th century political communications environment.
Americana: How much worse do you expect this cycle to be for disinformation? What was the effect of Elon Musk buying Twitter and dismantling their anti-disinfo apparatus?
Sasha Issenberg: Just about all of the platforms are less interested in moderating content than they were in 2020. There’s some business imperative there, and there’s some sensitivity to the aggressive Republican backlash towards these efforts. At Twitter, there used to be upward pressure on them to show that they were at least making a performance of taking this seriously. Post-Musk acquisition, Twitter headed in the other direction.
The folks who are doing this counter-disinformation work are on campaigns and party committees. If you go back to 2018, they thought they were often in tension with the platforms. Now, they think it’s a fundamentally adversarial relationship. When you add to that the novelty of AI tools, and their ability to do all sorts of disinformation very quickly and very cheaply, I think that it is a significantly worse environment than it was four years ago.
Americana: You write about foreign attempts to stop disinformation that don’t sound like they’d work here; we have a First Amendment, and they don’t. So how do the people fighting disinformation do it?
Sasha Issenberg: I think the biggest issue for our political practitioners is the novelty of it. My book starts in the aftermath of 2016, when you had the most important people in Democratic politics waking up to this. They look for people with expertise, and they find Americans who’ve been working in other countries, because these underlying trends are not that novel around the world. Foreign interference is common. Ideological or partisan media, which we pretend is a new thing, is common in our peer countries.
People are asking, “Oh no, what will we do about all these false rumors in politics?”’ Well, go to any country in the Middle East, and they’ll tell you, that’s what politics is. In countries that were already dealing with this, there was a little more muscle memory. I have a chapter set in Brazil and, and among the things that makes Brazil different is there’s no absolute guarantee of free speech. That is a legal counterweight to concerns about public order and maintaining democracy. It is really hard to imagine a legal regime like that here that could survive First Amendment scrutiny. Imagine if the FEC could arrest you for disinformation.
Americana: Do Republicans benefit more than Democrats from the current state of things?
Sasha Issenberg: That’s probably fair to say. You definitely see Republican elites who are more willing to try to get away with things that are brazenly false than they would have 10 or 15 years ago. I think the internal disincentives within the Republican Party for that behavior have diminished. There’s never been a law that prevents politicians from lying. Politicians have always exaggerated and reframed things in the most optimal way. Until very recently, almost all politicians lived in fear of being publicly called a liar. It was thought to be the type of thing that would be damaging in front of voters. If your opponent could put in an ad that you’re a liar, quoting some outside validator, that would be a problem. Maybe your donors would worry about the reputational damage of being tied to somebody who is called a liar. Maybe it’s harder to get colleagues to work with you.
One of the many novelties about Trump is that he operates only according to short-term incentives. The things that kept politicians relatively honest, most of the time, were mid- and long-term incentives, because they had reputational investments that were beyond the next news cycle. There’s something to be said for how [California Rep. Katie] Porter was hit for using the word “rigged.” The internal economy of the Democratic Party is still resistant to this in a way Republicans aren’t.
Americana: Is there a hierarchy of fakery? Is AI disinformation more potent than other sorts of disinformation?
Sasha Issenberg: Right now, we probably should be more worried about AI audio deep fakes than video deep fakes. They’re easier to do. The fake Biden audio that got sent to New Hampshire voters was harder to suss out than a fake video would have been. But there’s a peril in getting too caught up in the latest tech thing, and losing sight of what gets traction with voters.
What were the durable conspiracy theories that changed our politics in the last decade? I’d say QAnon, 2020 election denial, and vaccine skepticism. None of these were based on high-tech frauds. They were driven by politicians saying things into a microphone and on camera. Nobody was making up fake Eli Lilly trial videos to fool people into believing that the COVID vaccine was untrustworthy. They were just saying it out loud. We miss the point if we focus too much on the tools that people are using, instead of thinking about why we have a public and an electorate that is so susceptible to certain types of delusion.
What the ruling elites say is “information”.
When the peons come up with alternative narratives that is “disinformation”
Your description is a lot more accurate and concise than the article.
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They call the truth disinformation, and disinformation the truth. Liars not only love to lie, they love to be lied to as well. As long as it’s a lie they want to hear. So they have no problem with disinformation if they agree with it.
In 2 Thessalonians 2, the Bible speaks of the need to “receive the love of the truth.”
Because the Dems know their faithful minions (mind zombies) will believe anything they tell them.
If by this statement, you mean that Dems realized some folks were seeing through the Dems disinformation campaign, I agree.
..Republican elites who are more willing to try to get away with things that are brazenly false.
Provide examples, please, that are on the scale of Hillary!'s Russian dossier (that was headline news for
3 years and still trotted out occasionally by the MSM.)
What a load of Adam Shiff.
Now we have the potential for heavily used media channels outside their control (X, Truth Social, Gab, ...) to offer a competing narrative, but moreso, we have the ability for AI tools to allow the common person who is not part of a political machine to generate hard hitting counters to their propoganda that will strike a nerve with a large swath of the electorate. This is why they are losing their minds and you see thousands of news stories about disinformation and why AI needs to be controlled.
He thinks the Republicans are the main perpetrators of disinformation? That is completely crazy.
Russia Russia Russia was arguably the biggest disinformation campaign in our nation’s history. What does this Issenberg character have to say about that?
Or the cabal of intel top dogs who lied about the origins of Hunter’s laptop thereby swaying an election?
The right has its fringe kooks and excitable types who put out a certain amount of nonsense, but industrial strength strategic lying via the mainstream media organs is a specialty of the left.
Yes, that is pretty perfect and succinct.
The Left really can’t take an honest presentation of facts and fair debate. They’re on the side of censorship, which is rarely if ever where the good guys reside.
ping
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