Pushing limits of tolerance
Donald Trump’s tweets may be a distraction, but they have consequences around the planet.
The scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, who has drawn parallels between Trump’s rise and that of Mussolini, argues that authoritarians typically test “the limits of what the public, press and political class will tolerate” and that Trump’s incendiary tweets and remarks are efforts “to see how much Americans and the Republicans will let him get away with – and when, if ever, they will say ‘enough’”.
Trump’s tweets have been deemed official pronouncements of the President of the United States and will no doubt one day be printed out, finely bound, and shelved by someone wearing white gloves in a gold-shellacked presidential library. Whether they are distractions meant to divert attention from the Russia investigations, the stream-of-consciousness rants of an attention-craving narcissist, or part of a more deliberate strategy to acclimatise people to the aberrant, the tweets have immediate consequences around the planet, escalating nuclear tensions with North Korea, alienating whole countries and continents, and sending tremors through the post-World War II order.
Trump’s retweeting of antiMuslim videos from the far-right group Britain First earned a sharp rebuke from the UK’s Theresa
May and helped mainstream a heretofore marginal hate group.
His rants against journalism as “fake news” have enabled further crackdowns on press freedom in countries like Russia, China, Turkey and Hungary where reporters already work under duress. And they have been taken as licence by leaders of authoritarian regimes to dismiss reports of human rights abuses and war crimes in their own countries. After Amnesty International reported that up to 13,000 prisoners were killed at a military prison outside Damascus between 2011 and 2015, the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, said, “You can forge anything these days ... We are living in a fake news era.” And in Myanmar, where the military is carrying out a horrifying campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya, a long-persecuted Muslim minority, an officer in the state security ministry declared, “There is no such thing as Rohingya. It is fake news.” l
Trump’s rants against journalism as “fake news” have been taken as licence by authoritarian leaders to dismiss reports of human rights abuses and war crimes.
Vegas in October 2017 was an anti-Trump liberal who followed MoveOn.org and had recently become a Muslim.
During the last three months of the 2016 presidential campaign, BuzzFeed News reported, “top-performing” fake election news stories on Facebook generated more reader engagement than top stories from major news organisations like the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News and the Huffington Post. Of the 20 fake stories, all but three were pro-Trump or antiHillary Clinton, including one that claimed Clinton had sold weapons to ISIS and another that claimed the Pope had endorsed Trump.
In an impassioned essay, Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, argued that the Russians’ manipulation of Facebook, Twitter, Google and other platforms to try to shift the outcomes of the 2016 US election and the Brexit referendum was just the tip of a huge iceberg: unless fundamental changes were made, he warned, those platforms were going to be manipulated again, and “the level of political discourse, already in the gutter, was going to get even worse”.
The problems were inherent, McNamee argued, in the algorithms used by platforms like Facebook to maximise user engagement. The more time members spend on a platform, the more ads a company sells and the more profits it makes, and the way to maximise engagement is by “sucking up and analysing your data, using it to predict what will cause you to react most strongly, and then giving you more of that”. This not only creates the filter bubbles that seal people off in partisan silos but also favours simplistic, provocative messages. Conspiracy theories easily go viral on social media. And so do dumbed-down, inflammatory political messages – like those retailed by the Trump campaign and the Vote Leave party in Britain, appealing to raw emotions like the fear of immigrants or anger over disappearing jobs. Such populist messages, historians attest, tend to gain traction during times of economic uncertainty (as in the lingering aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 and snowballing income inequality) and cultural and social change (as with globalisation and seismic technological innovation).
TRADING ON ANGER
Trump’s hate-fuelled message was almost tailor-made for social media algorithms. Steve Bannon told the journalist Michael Lewis that Trump not only was an angry man but also had a unique ability to tap into the anger of others: “We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall. This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.”
At the same time, the Trump campaign made shrewd and Machiavellian use of social media and big-data tools, employing information from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica (a datascience firm partially owned by the Trump backer and Breitbart investor Robert Mercer that boasts of its ability to psychologically profile millions of potential voters) to target its advertising and plan Trump’s campaign stops.
The master manipulators of social media in the 2016 election, of course, were the Russians whose long-term goal – to erode voters’ faith in democracy and the electoral system – dovetailed with their short-term goal of tipping the outcome toward Trump. US intelligence agencies also concluded that Russian hackers stole emails from the Democratic National Committee, which were later provided to WikiLeaks. These plots were all part of a concerted effort by the Kremlin, stepped up since Putin’s re-election in 2012, to use asymmetrical, non-military means to achieve its goals of weakening the European Union and Nato and undermining faith in globalism and Western democratic liberalism. Toward such ends, Russia has been supporting populist parties in Europe, like Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front party in France, and has interfered in the elections of at least 19 European countries in recent years. It also continues to wage disinformation campaigns through state media outlets like Sputnik and RT.
In the case of the American election, Facebook told Congress that Russian operatives published some 80,000 posts on Facebook between June 2015 and August 2017 that might have been seen by 126 million Americans; that’s more than half the number of people registered to vote in the country.
The sheer volume of dezinformatsiya unleashed by the Russian firehose system – much like the more improvised but equally voluminous stream of lies, scandals, and shocks emitted by Trump, his Republican enablers, and media apparatchiks – tends to overwhelm and numb people while simultaneously defining deviancy down and normalising the unacceptable. Outrage gives way to outrage fatigue, which gives way to the sort of cynicism and weariness that empowers those disseminating the lies. As the former world chess champion and Russian pro-democracy leader Garry Kasparov tweeted in December 2016, “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” l
The sheer volume of dezinformatsiya unleashed by the Russian firehose system tends to overwhelm and numb people. Outrage gives way to the sort of cynicism and weariness that empowers those disseminating the lies.