New online rule: Think before sharing
Russian propaganda feeds on anger
If American civic life is ever to divert from its current nasty course, Americans are going to have to unlearn the destructive habits of social media and get used to questioning what they read. We need to think more, and stop being suckers.
The Feb. 16 indictment of 13 Russians on election-interference charges by U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller put a fine point on what we’ve been learning for some time: The Russia-based campaign to make Americans angry and ill-informed was big, organized and sharp.
Though most of the fake posts were aimed at conservatives and boosted presidential candidate Donald Trump and disparaged Hillary Clinton, some were just as inflammatory on the left, stirring up fights between the Clinton and Bernie Sanders camps during the Democratic primary.
It worked, because social-media platforms are engineered to encourage and reward sharing of content. Angry, shocking posts get the most clicks, so the algorithms put them at the top of newsfeeds. Americans saw and shared.
What Facebook or Twitter user hasn’t seen an angry post by an online friend, sharing a story that would be outrageous if it were true? The reaction often is, “Where do they get this stuff?”
Thanks to a lot of postelection forensics, we know that some of it came from Russian-controlled “bots” — automated accounts designed to flood Twitter and Facebook with posts that look like they came from Americans.
And it’s not over, by any means, because it wasn’t just about swaying an election; it’s about damaging American society, by crippling our ability to trust, discuss and compromise.
Any contentious issue will do. Russian-linked bot accounts helped stoke both sides of the fight over NFL players kneeling to protest racism. They were part of the #ReleaseTheMemo campaign, aimed at discrediting the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
News of the highschool shooting in Parkland, Florida, wasn’t out long before analysts who track this sort of activity saw Russianlinked accounts jumping on the #Parklandshooting hashtag with posts for and against gun control. To further stir the pot, they threw in lies, such as a claim that accused shooter Nikolas Cruz had searched for Arabic phrases on his computer before the shootings.
How can Americans of goodwill fight this information attack? The answer can’t be to stop trusting any information source; that would be victory for the attackers.
Instead, living in an information-drenched time, we’ll have to do the hard work of reading beyond headlines and meme text to see the alleged source of a claim. If something sounds outrageous, we’ll have to give our opponents the benefit of the doubt and recognize that the sensational story might be garbage put out to sucker us into fighting each other instead of building a stronger society.
Even better, we could decide to dial down our outrage and not automatically share the stuff that makes us angry. Anger tends to crowd out reason, and if there's anything American society needs right now, it's a dose of reason.