Feelings over facts in a new information age

Information realignment and algorithmic shifts... Quid pro quo and selectively hawkish foreign policy... Ongoing investigations...

Misinformation, disinformation, psychological warfare, cronyism, oligarchy, autocracy — there are a lot of words and phrases that can be used to describe the various machinations, political and otherwise, that are transforming American society as Donald Trump begins standing up his second administration.

But I think the best way to describe what has happened with the second election of Trump and what we’ll see going forward is information realignment. There is endless evidence to suggest that most Americans consume information based more on narrative than fact. One has to look no further than the current state of hibernation that the election denial movement finds itself in to confirm this. After years of clamoring that our elections are inherently fraudulent, the movement has quietly, peacefully and smugly accepted the results of this election for the very simple and obvious reason that their guy won. 

That’s one piece of evidence that proves an entire wing of the right-wing information ecosystem — websites and publications, elected officials, influencers and pundits who have all been laser-focused on supposed election fraud — was never rooted in fact. Instead, it was based on the belief that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, a feeling borne of an inability to accept that the right’s political views were not reflective of the rest of the country’s. Trump’s win exposed that this was always more of a belief system than a factual representation of true events. 

But that belief system didn’t accelerate all on its own. The algorithms of social media amplified election denialism to the point that it became a core tenet of conservatism. Facebook abdicated any responsibility it once claimed for the amplification of misinformation in the 2016 election by supposedly de-prioritizing political content. This appears to have had the effect of simply allowing right-wing political content to proliferate on Meta’s platforms. Meanwhile on Elon Musk’s X and on Tik Tok, we now know that those platforms’ algorithms were purposefully juiced to amplify right-wing content over that of the left. In Musk’s case, this was to help Trump win. In the case of Tik Tok, algorithmic shifts were likely done to appease Republican lawmakers in an attempt to stave off a ban of the platform in the U.S.

The Internet has fragmented the media landscape in a way that anyone can dive into whatever niche subject matter they want and stay there. Depending on what information sources one consumes, there can be endless layers of narrative-shaping and truth-twisting — let alone outright lies — between you and the factual, objective truth. Anyone can “do their own research” in order to confirm their own biases on virtually any issue. (Only half-joking here but I think folks need to stop doing their own research because it’s leading them to dark places that have little basis in fact.) 

“The biggest story about media and the internet is that new technology — AI, social media, smartphones, etc. — keeps driving down the cost of producing bullshit while the cost of obtaining quality information only goes up,” journalist and media union leader Matt Pearce wrote recently. “It’s getting more and more expensive to produce the good stuff, and the good stuff has to compete against more and more trash once it’s out on the market.”

We are reaching a point where facts are obliterated by the feelings of those consuming them — I believe X, Y or Z because I want to believe it, not because it’s necessarily true. This is something I heard over and over again in the last three years in my conversations with election deniers. When I pressed them on what their evidence was of widespread election fraud, they often had none. They certainly weren’t able to describe their supposed evidence of fraud in any concise or reasonable manner. Instead, they believed or felt that it was true. The facts of the matter had little to do with the formulation of their beliefs.

In this environment, it can be difficult to get up each day and hunt down facts for the various stories I’m working on. It can feel like I’m spending a lot of time doing things that will have little to no effect on the public’s understanding of the complex issues of our world — filing public records requests, digging through court records, calling sources, knocking on doors. You know, the work of journalism. It feels like for every one of me, there are 100 people who take the work product of fact-based journalism and apply a narrative to it. To use an old newsroom analogy, it feels like there are far more columnists opining about the news than there are reporters reporting it. Worse, the people who run the newspaper now understand that it’s the columnists who drive subscriptions, so they keep hiring more of them instead of the reporters who hunt down facts to create the news. 

I’m not sure how we get out of this but I just have to remind myself that there are people who appreciate and understand the difference between what Pearce called “bullshit” content and actual news. I imagine some of those people are reading this right now. Speaking of the news, here’s a few things I’m paying attention to…

• Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office tells me that local law enforcement continues to investigate bomb threats allegedly sent by Russian actors to Black voting precincts during the election. These threats were also directed toward minority polling locations in Pennsylvania among other acts of foreign interference, like the fake video of Haitian migrants claiming to have voted in Georgia. I’m waiting to hear back from federal law enforcement as to their role in this investigation. 

• Meantime, the silence from Trumpworld has been deafening on these threats. (Imagine what it would look like if threats like these were directed at rural polling places in red states.) Instead, Trump’s nominee for CIA director, John Ratcliffe, is focused on the hacking of the Trump campaign’s emails and alleged plot to assassinate Trump, both allegedly carried out by Iran. Ratcliffe is calling for the U.S. to conduct joint attacks on Iran in coordination with Israel. So much for Trump’s claims that he’ll get us out of foreign entanglements.

• It was probably these threats and the fake videos from Russia that were being referred to by the country’s intelligence chief, Nikolai Petrushev, when he said that Trump’s win was thanks to “certain forces.” “The election campaign is over.” Petrushev told Russian media. “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.” What are Trump’s “obligations” to Russia? Wouldn’t we like to know. Well, at least some of us…

• Also along the lines of quid pro quo, British and U.S. intelligence officials are concerned that Trump could withhold important intelligence information in order to secure policy goals, or loyalty from the British government. 

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