Outside the Beltway

Disinformation, Dystopia, and Disillusion

Bizarre conspiracy theories shared by powerful people are immune to fact checking.

James Joyner · Saturday, October 12, 2024 · 20 comments

A series of recent essays in The Atlantic, likely not coordinated, paint a somber picture of the state of the American political landscape.

Wednesday, Elaine Godfrey predicted, “November Will Be Worse.”

Last week, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted a map on X to show Hurricane Helene’s path overlapping with majority-Republican areas in the South. She followed it up with an explanation: “Yes they can control the weather.”

Greene was using they as a choose-your-own-adventure word, allowing her followers to replace the pronoun with their own despised group: the federal government, perhaps, or liberal elites, or Democrats. All of the above? Whoever they are, Greene appeared to be saying, they sent a hurricane roaring toward Trump country.

The claim may be laughable, but Greene wasn’t trying to be funny. Donald Trump and his allies, including Greene, are working hard to politicize the weather—to harness Helene and soon-to-make-landfall Milton as a kind of October surprise against the Democrats before next month’s election. Such false claims have real-world implications, not least impeding recovery efforts. But they also offer a foretaste of the grievance-fueled disinformation mayhem that we’ll see on and after Election Day. In what will almost certainly be another nail-biter of an election—decided once again by tens of thousands of votes in a few states—conspiracy-mongering about the validity of the results could lead to very real political unrest.

Over the next few weeks, “we’re going to see this disinformation get worse,” Graham Brookie, a disinformation expert at the Atlantic Council, an international-affairs think tank, told me. “We’re going to be coming back to this again and again and again.”

[…]

Online, rumors swirled. Right-wing activists shared texts from unnamed acquaintances in unidentified places complaining about the government response. Elon Musk, a recent convert to the Church of Trump, told his 200 million followers on X that FEMA had been “ferrying illegals” into the country instead of “saving American lives.” Later, when he accused the Federal Aviation Administration of blocking aid to parts of North Carolina, Musk was talked down by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who apparently assured him in a phone call that this was not happening.

The practical effect of these falsehoods is that local officials have to spend precious time and energy combatting misinformation, rather than recovery efforts.

[…]

The problem is that their efforts aren’t making much of an impact, Nina Jankowicz, the author of How to Lose the Information War, told me. “That is in part because we have seen the complete kind of buy-in from the Republican Party establishment into these falsehoods.”

[…]

Rumor and distortiontypically abound during and after storms, mass shootings, and other “crisis-information environments,” as the academic parlance labels them. And elections, especially ones with narrow margins, have very similar dynamics, Brookie, from the Atlantic Council, told me. “There’s a lot of new information, high levels of engagement, and a lot of really sustained focus on every single update.”

The 2024 election may not be called on November 5 and could easily remain unresolved for a few days afterward. In that fuzzy interregnum, a very familiar series of events could unfold. Just replace Trump’s hurricane-related conspiracy theories with some wild allegation about Sharpies at polling sites or secret bins full of uncounted ballots. Instead of being blamed for hogging FEMA resources, undocumented immigrants will be accused of voting en masse. It’s easy to imagine, because we already saw it play out in 2020: the suitcases of ballots and a burst pipe, the tainted Dominion voting machines, the hordes of zombie voters. The MAGA loyalists in Congress and the pro-Trump media ecosystem will amplify these claims. Musk, never one to stay calm on the sidelines, will leap into the fray with his proprietary algorithm-boosted commentary.

Local election officials will try to clear things up, but it could be too late. Millions of Americans across the country, primed to distrust government and institutions, will be sure that something sinister has taken place.

Thursday, Charlie Warzel lamented, “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is.”

The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!”

[…]

Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.

Some of the lies and obfuscation are politically motivated, such as the claim that FEMA is offering only $750 in total to hurricane victims who have lost their home. (In reality, FEMA offers $750 as immediate “Serious Needs Assistance” to help people get basic supplies such as food and water.) Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Fox News have all repeated that lie. Trump also posted (and later deleted) on Truth Social that FEMA money was given to undocumented migrants, which is untrue. Elon Musk, who owns X, claimed—without evidence—that FEMA was “actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own. It’s very real and scary how much they have taken control to stop people helping.” That post has been viewed more than 40 million times. Other influencers, such as the Trump sycophant Laura Loomer, have urged their followers to disrupt the disaster agency’s efforts to help hurricane victims. “Do not comply with FEMA,” she posted on X. “This is a matter of survival.”

[…]

It is difficult to capture the nihilism of the current moment. The pandemic saw Americans, distrustful of authority, trying to discredit effective vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories, and attacking public-health officials. But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit. Similarly, those sharing the lies are happy to admit that they do not care whether what they’re pushing is real or not. Such was the case last week, when Republican politicians shared an AI-generated viral image of a little girl holding a puppy while supposedly fleeing Helene. Though the image was clearly fake and quickly debunked, some politicians remained defiant. “Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” Amy Kremer, who represents Georgia on the Republican National Committee, wrote after sharing the fake image. “I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.”

Kremer wasn’t alone. The journalist Parker Molloy compiled screenshots of people “acknowledging that this image is AI but still insisting that it’s real on some deeper level”—proof, Molloy noted, that we’re “living in the post-reality.” The technology writer Jason Koebler argued that we’ve entered the “‘Fuck It’ Era” of AI slop and political messaging, with AI-generated images being used to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.

[…]

So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information. What is clear from comments such as Kremer’s is that she is not a dupe; although she may come off as deeply incurious and shameless, she is publicly admitting to being an active participant in the far right’s world-building project, where feel is always greater than real.

Yesterday, Renée DiResta declared, “Rumors on X Are Becoming the Right’s New Reality.”

A curious set of claims has recently emerged from the right-wing corners of the social-media platform X: FEMA is systematically abandoning Trump-supporting Hurricane Helene victims; Democrats (and perhaps Jewish people) are manipulating the weather; Haitian immigrants are eating pet cats in Springfield, Ohio. These stories seem absurd to most people. But to a growing number of Americans living in bespoke realities, wild rumors on X carry weight. Political influencers, elites, and prominent politicians on the right are embracing even pathologically outlandish claims made by their base. They know that amplifying online rumors carries little cost—and offers considerable political gain.

Unverified claims that spread from person to person, filling the voids where uncertainty reigns, are as old as human communication itself. Some of the juiciest rumors inspire outrage and contradict official accounts—and from time to time, such a claim turns out to be true. Sharing a rumor is a form of community participation, a way of signaling solidarity with friends, ostracizing some out-group, or both. Political rumors are particularly well suited to the current incarnation of X, a platform that evolved from a place for real-time news and conversations into a gladiatorial arena for partisan fights, owned by a reflexive contrarian with a distaste for media, institutions, and most authority figures.

[…]

Many political rumors on social media begin when people share something they supposedly heard from an indirect acquaintance: The false narrative about pet-eating Haitian immigrants in Springfield started when one woman posted to a Facebook group that her neighbor’s daughter’s friend had lost their cat and had seen Haitians in a house nearby carving it up to eat. Others picked up the story and started posting about it. Another woman shared a screenshot of the Springfield post on X, to bolster her own previous claim that ducks were disappearing from local parks.

Unbound by geography, online rumors can spread very far, very fast; if they gain enough traction, they may trend, drawing still more participants into the discussion. The X post received more than 900,000 views within a few days. Others amplified the story, expressing alarm about Haitian immigrants. No substantive evidence of the wild claims ever emerged.

[…]

The amplification of emotionally manipulative chatter is a familiar issue on social media. What’s more disconcerting is that Republican political elites—with Musk now among them—are openly legitimizing what the X rumor mill churns out when it serves their objectives. X’s owner has claimed that FEMA is “actively blocking citizens” who are trying to help flood victims in North Carolina, and that it “used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives.” J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, elevated rumors of pet-eating Haitians to national attention on social media for days; Donald Trump did the same in a presidential debate. Influential public figures and political elites—people who, especially in times of crisis, should be acting as voices of reason—are using baseless, often paranoid allegations for partisan advantage.

Wednesday and Thursday, I taught our block on the Politics of Information, looking at, among other things, U.S. public diplomacy efforts and the disinformation campaigns our adversaries, especially China and Russia. I have little doubt that their armies of agitators are helping spread the disinformation about the hurricane to further divide our citizenry. But, frankly, much of it amounts to gilding the lily. We’re doing a good enough of a job of it ourselves.

There’s doubtless plenty of this on the other side as well. That there was a government conspiracy to get Black men hooked on crack cocaine and kill gays with the AIDS virus were articles of faith for many. And the anti-vaccine conspiracy that became so prominent among Trumpers with COVID had mainly been on the left previously.

But, as DiResta rightly notes, there’s a huge different with the current conspiracy-mongering:

What of left-wing rumors? They exist, of course. After the assassination attempts on Trump, some commentators insinuated that they were “false flag” attacks—in other words, that his camp had staged the incidents to gain public sympathy for him. But mainstream media called out left-wing conspiracism and fact-checked the rumors. The people expressing them were overwhelmingly censured, not encouraged, by fellow influencers and elites on their side of the political spectrum.

In contrast, when social-media companies stepped in to address false claims of voter fraud in 2020, the political influencers who most frequently spread them clamored for retribution, and their allies delivered. Representative Jim Jordan, one of the House’s most powerful Republicans, convened a congressional subcommittee that cast efforts to fact-check and label misleading posts as “censorship.” (Full disclosure: I was one of the panel’s targets.)

One of these things is not like the other.