The internet supports a global ecosystem of social interaction. Modern life revolves around the network, with its status updates, news feeds, comment chains, political advocacy, omnipresent reviews, rankings and ratings. The Pew Research Center (2017) reports that nearly two-thirds of Americans get their news from social media. They still read, but they read on their phones, iPads and computers, and get their news and information there. As pointed out in a previous post, there are ways to detect fake news before it spreads, but a significant percentage of the electorate is in the thrall of fake news, and has basically chosen to switch off both their brains, and sense of responsibility, in the act of proliferating disinformation and accelerating the dumbing down of America. Why does this pattern of behavior not bode well for our democracy? Hannah Arendt, in “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, asserted that the ideal subjects of totalitarian rule are "people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." This is what is happening. If you point out that a “news story” is not true, many folks nowadays simply shrug their shoulders, and say “That’s your opinion,” or “Who cares? It’s what I believe.”
To review, fake news are stories that are presented in such a way that they appear to be legitimate “headlines” but are totally made up by groups trying to sell a point of view without citations or supporting evidence. Did Pope Francis endorse Donald Trump? Did Hillary Clinton run a child sex ring out of a pizzeria? Did Whoopi Goldberg condemn Carryn Owens, the widow of the Navy SEAL killed in the January 2017 Yemen raid? Nope. But a 2016 Stanford study demonstrated that people of any age, even young folks well versed in uses of social media, can be fooled by fake news. The rapid rate of proliferation of a totally fake news story, or groundless claim, can make it go viral, turn it into a public pronouncement, and sway public opinion. And when government officials, and their kin, directly promote fake news stories and baseless claims as fact, their proliferation can be even more rapid, as persons are even more likely to deem such claims as “reliable” or “trustworthy” when considering the source. General Michael Flynn's son, for instance, continued to tweet the PizzaGate story, after Edgar Welch went into the DC pizzeria and fired off several shots and was arrested. This constitutes irresponsible behavior at the very least. But many citizens say to themselves, “He has no reason to lie, does he? He was head of the NSA, so he knows a lot more than we do about these things.” Or, “He’s the President; he wouldn’t be saying it if it weren’t true.” Unable to evaluate the veracity of these tweets and posts, many persons can get “sick”, angry and outraged over what amounts to disinformation, or something totally made up.
Meet James McDaniel, a 28-year-old Clearwater native who created a fake news website last year as a joke to see just how "naive" Internet readers could be. McDaniel says that when millions of folks shared these fake news stories, he decided to stop creating and promoting these fake news stories. Commenters turned threads to “grave discussions about dead service members and Goldberg’s lack of respect”. “I might have carried on a bit longer because I was having fun," McDaniel said, "but people took the Whoopi Goldberg story so seriously and it had gotten so big I thought I had better pull the plug."
So a touchy issue surfaces: Are citizens who believe fake news, and distrust the real news, disconnected from reality? I am not a big fan of the medical model, or diagnosis of persons from my couch at home, but could persons who believe what is not true, and do not believe what is empirically supported by scientists or other experts, be diagnosed as mentally unwell? If their beliefs lead to emotional dysregulation, and thoughts and plans to do violence, and they are a harm to themselves or others (e.g., start shooting up a pizzeria for no real reason), yes, as their subsequent behavior becomes a concern of clinicians and laypeople alike.
Belief in what is not empirically supported, and not believing what is empirically supported (e.g., climate change, the Russian hacking of social media during the 2016 campaign) gets into a question of reality testing, and mental health. Are people in touch with what’s really going on in their country, and in the world, or are they pawns to be weaponized by tweets and retweets, adverts bought on Google and FaceBook in Russian rubles, and “articles” shared without study or review, simply clicked and shared with zero evaluation?
Human beings have a natural tendency to take in information that fits their own perspective of the world. We tend to reject information or evidence that goes against our beliefs and worldview. And we do that for a very simple reason. We don't like it when we feel wrong. We don't like it when people tell us we're wrong because that threatens our psychological well-being. So what tends to happen is that we look for information; we look for evidence that fits what we already know or what we already believe, and we try to avoid information or evidence that we either disagree with or that we know doesn't fit with our perspective. And if someone comes along and says, 'here's the evidence', your natural tendency is actually to rehearse arguments against that evidence.
That is to say, sometimes when we don’t know what we’re talking about, we keep on thinking the same unsupported things, because we're not inclined to do our due diligence in checking sources and researching the stories offered up for our consumption, or we're not inclined to do the legwork, and brainwork, to accommodate new information and new ideas. Instead, folks tend to shunt information into prefab categories in their brains, and stay the course. Nevertheless, part of civic responsibility is to have standards, and to expect a degree of veracity and truth telling, at least part of the time, from elected leaders, and to expect that our leaders will represent, at least part of the time, the interests of the persons that voted them in. Citizenship is also about having standards about what “information” we view and promote by sharing. There's a lot of trash out there on the interwebs, and some folks are sharing fake stories expressly for the purpose of stoking an atmosphere of tribalism across the country. So, in 2018, please share consciously, carefully, and wisely. Our democracy, and civil society, may depend on it.
Kyle D. Killian, PhD is author of Interracial Couples, Intimacy & Therapy: Crossing Racial Borders from Columbia University Press.