Surprisingly, the most powerful source of false information is neither Trump nor the Russian trolls. It’s a unique American business model that drives the false information.
With all the hullaballoo about false information, the Russian trolls and Trump's ritualized falsehoods on Twitter, I’ve been at a loss to understand the reality and the actual facts behind all that’s going on. So I was delighted to see the data and insights in an article by Vera Tolz in the December 3 issue (“Shortcuts”) of the London Review of Books. Tolz holds an endowed professorship in Russian Studies at the University of Manchester (UK). My review is indicative of a slight bias toward Brit scholarship on issues like this.
The data presented and the resulting conclusions offer a far better background for our understanding of fake information and Russia’s supposed role in it. In addition, given the Washington riots of January 6, which happened after the article was written, we now have a far richer understanding of the role of the internet.
As Tolz argues, Trump’s November 5 press conference in which he claimed he won the election and there had been massive voter fraud are indicative of the fact that we had learned nothing from the election of 2016. The left claimed the press and broadcasters were indulging the right. In contrast, the right claimed that the media hadn’t indulged them enough.
Russian trolls?
By that time, there was a strong liberal consensus that much of the internet misinformation had come from Russia. Pro-Trump Russia wants to disrupt elections, create chaos and interfere with balloting. Tolz points out that both the States and the UK have fallen into the trap of believing in this “information war” paradigm. The paradigm assumes that the main threats to both countries come from the outside. A fact the data does not support.
It’s true that a history of Russian trolls attempting to
The “war paradigm”
To better understand these fallacies and influence failures, it’s important to recognize that since about 2001, we’ve been the recipients of a counter-terrorism “war” paradigm. The metaphor exerts profound impact on not just the Pentagon, but also on writers and politicians. What makes this a paradigm rather than merely a conglomeration of evolving policies is the cohesiveness and mutual reinforcement of its underlying rationales about the rights of the US government to prosecute a territorially unbounded war against an evolving cast of enemies. Furthermore, military metaphors are “inherently masculine, power-based, paternalistic and violent,” making them very appealing to our military and political culture. Once they’re in place in public consciousness, they are terrifically difficult to dissolve o ignore. To a significant degree, Bush’s comment after 9/11 that we are at “war with terrorism” and then the "war on terror" a few days later in Congress actually limited the potential for thoughtful decision making. So now we have “cyberwarfare,” another military metaphor that controls 21st century thinking as strongly as the counter-terrorism paradigm of the last century.
Mary Dudziak, a legal historian, points out that military conflict has been going on for decades. Yet public policy still treats it as an aberration. This supports a culture of public irresponsibility around public policy. As Dudziak concludes, a “cultural framing of wartimes as discrete and temporary occasions. . . undermines democratic vigilance.” So, budgets inevitably go toward the pentagon and defense, heedless of public need or investment. And like others, I stupidly wondered why infrastructure, education and climate change were ignored. The war paradigm is at least part of the issue. And of course, the belief that fraud was largely based in external propaganda and authoritarian countries until the 2020 election and the riots of January focused journalists and politicians internally.
It’s only been in the last month that mainstream media outlets have begun to pay more attention to American misinformation sources. It’s become clear that Trump and Trumpism was not a glitch that started and ended with The Donald. Research by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt helps us understand why more than 70 million US citizens voted for Trump in November. And why multiple Republican officials supported the claims of election fraud despite the lack of evidence. or a democratic system to endure, trust in the integrity of elections is essential. Levitsky and Ziblatt “show that the casting of doubt on the electoral process, particularly by Republican officials, began in the US at the end of the 1990s, implicitly delegitimizing the Democrats as popular representatives. Even before the 2016 vote, polls showed that the majority of registered Republicans believed that significant levels of fraud occurred during US elections, although by any real measure electoral irregularities in the US are extremely rare.”
Although the Russians were hacking for the 2016 election, the evidence reveals no changing of votes. In addition, research reveals a strange fact: the influence of Russia on that election was minimal. Measuring tweets and other social media posts can be performed easily. In fact, there was a surprisingly low level of Russian Troll activities in the swing states that decide the outcomes of US elections. In the latest election, the coverage of Rudy Giuliani’s accusations of elector fraud was from a conservative media organization that has been operating in Florida for twenty years—Newsmax. It had 1.6 million within hours of being posted on YouTube on November 10. In contrast, the Russians had barely 9,000 views by the end of the month.
The business model
The most active accounts, with the largest number of followers in 2016, belonged to a local Republican party organization in Tennessee. Their extensive power is the result of the way they incentivize and reward their employees. The pay of the rank-and-file employees is not linked to whether they change voter preferences. Instead, the employees are paid to follow one another’s accounts, retweet another’s posts and use identical content. If you’ve been paying attention to organizational offers from the same business (say Anderson windows in Minnesota), you’ll notice that it’s different people and websites sending the same message over and over, making your spam button irrelevant. I’ve tracked the same business messages on different occasions, finding that they were simply repeated emails from different people.
But all the retweets of identical content from hundreds of different people and sites cast doubt on the validity of the election process. So, Trump successfully spun doubts on the electoral process. His supporters were able to spin to their advantage the perception created back in 2016 that the election process was rigged.
The fallout from this model shows that the wider pathologies in media operations are at home—not Russia, China or elsewhere. Of course, the model also supports the Russian political elite in arguing that the West is both paranoid and Russophobic. Importantly, the fallout from this election also clearly reveals that confrontation with these organizations can no longer be ignored. It’s not just Apple, Amazon or Facebook.