How political rumours have been weaponized in the Age of Donald Trump

Social psychologists recognize three different types of rumours; dread rumours, wish rumours, and wedge-driving rumours.

According to a 2007 book by Nicholas Difonzo PhD and Prashant Bordia PhD, “Rumour transmission is motivated by three broad psychological motivations — fact- finding, relationship- enhancement, and self-enhancement” and are defined by four basic qualities.

They are information statements, they are in circulation and they are unverified. And they are instrumentally relevant. Political rumours, falling largely into the selfenhancement category, have become a regular part of the public discourse.

In the Age of U.S. President Donald Trump, rumours have been weaponized, and now threaten democracy.

DiFonzo and Bordia explain, “Rumour is closely entwined with a host of social and organizational phenomena, including social cognition, attitude formation and maintenance, prejudice and stereotyping, group dynamics, interpersonal and inter-group relations, social influence, and organizational trust and communication.”

A 2016 article in Psychology Today identified the laws governing effective rumours, including the need for anxieties and emotions, the need to be somewhat surprising but fit into existing biases, and the need to reflect the prevailing zeitgeist. Easily swayed people are more important in passing on a rumour, and the more that you hear a rumour the more you’ll buy it. Social-media today offer a perfect platform for the propagation of rumour.

In 2016, researchers at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism published a paper entitled “Political rumouring on Twitter during the 2012 US presidential election: Rumour diffusion and correction.” They reported, “We found that Twitter helped rumour spreaders circulate false information within homophilous follower networks, but seldom functioned as a self-correcting marketplace of ideas. Rumour spreaders formed strong partisan structures in which core groups of users selectively transmitted negative rumours about opposing candidates. Yet, rumour rejecters neither formed a sizable community nor exhibited a partisan structure.” They also found that rumour tweets were retweeted at a much higher rate than non-rumour tweets, and that the rumour rejection rate was only 3.37 per cent. Partisan bubbles reinforce rumour, while rejecting any corrective factual information that does not support user bias within. Rumours persist … as they say. Especially on Twitter.

While political rumours have been around for a long time, socialmedia and a 24-hour news cycle have created an environment that facilitates the spread of misinformation with greater fluency than at any other time in history.

But how are rumours weaponized by politicians exactly? Trump has used rumour more than any other politician, past or present. It forms part of his daily dialogue with the public.

A small sample would include; former president Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. (he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii), Obama is a Muslim (he is actually a Protestant Christian), the Mexican government plot to send rapists and other criminals to the U.S., thousands of Muslims celebrated the 9/11 attacks from rooftops in New Jersey, climate-change denial … the list is almost endless.

The rumour begins with a tweet or an offhand remark from Trump. Reactive discourse rapidly spreads across social-media which begins to establish a narrative. It is then picked up by mainstream media and introduced into the public dialogue. As more and more people join in, the rumour gains credibility … it becomes a possibility in the minds of some, especially those with pre-existing bias supported by the rumour.

According to a PEW Research poll in 2010 — a year and a half into his presidency — 18 per cent of Americans and 34 per cent of Republicans believed that Obama was a Muslim, while 43 per cent said that they did not know. A 2015 CNN/ORC poll — in his seventh year — found that 29 per cent of Americans and 43 per cent of Republicans believed (again, incorrectly) that Obama was a Muslim, and 20 per cent of Americans believe that he was born outside the U.S.

Rumours affect voter behaviour, and therein lies the problem. The profusion of misinformation today in the prevailing climate of posttruth — “fake-news,” “alternate facts,” “truthiness,” and image manipulation technology — makes it difficult to distinguish rhetoric from reality.

What is real? Reality is what you can get away with.