Betrayal of Trust
How do we find certainty in the age of misinformation?
On January 20, 2021, just hours after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were sworn into office, the new White House press secretary Jennifer Psaki addressed a crowd of reporters: “I have deep respect for the role of a free and independent press,” adding, “We have a common goal, which is sharing accurate information with the American people.”
It was a welcome reprieve from the last four years of Trump’s Twitter persona-turned-President. That environment was well-suited for bluster and overly focused on generating narratives that proved the world was as Trump saw it. The promised restoration of “truth and transparency” under the Biden administration, as Psaki stated last week, feels like an overdue vaccine for the dangerous ‘infodemic.’
Feature or Bug
Trump is both a feature and a bug in our modern information environment. He rose to power because, and profited from the power, of a professional media cabal (I’m thinking here of cable news, particularly) that has seeded an ecosystem that broadcasts a kind of multiple-worlds reality. By understanding more about their customer, these brands sought to be the eternal crypt-keeper — preserving their vision of right and wrong, laudable and deplorable, on a 24-hour loop.
Other news producers, also trying to “optimize” coverage for their followers, struggled to navigate a public sphere steady wrenched apart, often falling victim to the divisions of our cultural moment with seasoned editors dangerously offering “both sides” (or the “other side”) of stories when only one was reasonable. The awful consequence, however, was how these micro-controversies tended to favor the offending parties, who use the opportunity to profit personally from the usually toothless cultural censure. These conditions are primed to support the crisis of misinformation — and continued exploitation. But the rot runs deeper.
While Psaki’s promise couldn’t have come soon enough, it’s clear we’ve already hit stage-four danger. According to Axios last week, fewer than half of all Americans have trust in the traditional media. Sure, polling can be complex (and myriad factors help shape the result), but the text from the survey is damning:
56% of Americans agree with the statement that "Journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations."
58% think that "most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public."
As anthropologist and vaccine ‘rumor hunter,’ Heidi Larson, tells The New York Times: “we don’t have a misinformation problem … we have a trust problem.”
Distinctions of Difference
Trust can be as difficult to define as it is easy to lose. To that end, it can be easier to explain what trust does, more than what it is. As the social glue that makes coexistence possible, trust serves as a kind of stabilizer — a belief that our relationship to the people and institutions around us is predictable enough to get on with the labor of living. Trust is aided by confidence in our capacity to understand and anticipate the likely behaviors and outcomes around us. For that reason, trust is effectively corroded if we are continually lied to. As Hannah Arendt has written (and people are quick to quote):
“If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer … And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind.”
Trust is also reliant on our sense of self in any given time and place. The fact that listeners flipping between Fox News and CNN find different realities shaped from the same “breaking news” created its own incalculable mental tax, effectively shoring away any sense of solidity in our physical world. This dual construction of the world further inhibits our natural social corrective — empathy — as the competing narratives already specify who to pity or blame, and the heroes we ought to celebrate. The media ecosystems operate as if they are different planets: their atmospheres are poisonous to non-residents and where the search for intelligent life appears futile.
Media outlets have been intimately engaged in their own decline. The leading cause of decay stems from the so-called business of entertainment, where the public provision of information (i.e., those details you ought to know as an informed citizen) has been subjected to the slings and arrows of capital and its associated “attention merchants” — eager to monetize the time you’re willing to spend scrolling news sites on your phone or computer.
SYMPTOMS OF THE DISEASE
Rolling Stone Magazine joins Forbes with a “pay to play” policy for “Thought Leaders” eager to shape the culture of the future. For $2,000 (and after a “vetting process”) industry-leaders can publish their thoughts/ideas/musings in the pages of the magazine.
To balance this duty to inform with the business need to entice, media brands have inked their Faustian bargain: they personalize their appeals according to how you (the reader) wishes the world to be. They then curate their coverage and content to satisfy or enrage those sensibilities. Junk food instead of a balanced diet. But the distrust of media is just one worrying weather pattern within this wider climate crisis: there are few (and dwindling) places where trust is maintained.
According to Edelman’s 2020 Trust Barometer, less than 50 percent of the population (globally) believes religious or government leaders have the ability to address today’s challenges, while none of the central institutions of modern life (NGOs, businesses, media, or governments) are seen as both competent AND ethical (Note: NGOs are the only institution seen as “ethical”). All of this can make one desperate for places to turn for hope in the dark.
Dangerous Escape
We should think of trust as a kind of matter: it cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. As it leaks from our traditional institutions, it finds home in micro-monopolies of peer-to-peer influence.
In this sense, social media is (perhaps counterintuitively) the final and vital form of escape. While the social media platforms record lower levels of trust than traditional media, individuals’ personal social media spaces serve as a kind of reprieve that (users feel) won’t easily be encroached upon by “outsiders” or “disruptors.” Instead of the whiplash effects of transiting between Planets Fox and CNN, your “feed” offers stability — buoyed by the echo-chamber of interests and selective algorithms.
At first, these can feel like low-cost survival strategies. Social networks allow us to connect with our friends and loved ones. And, even if we sometimes find ourselves tumbling into edgier digital communities, these can still feel like spaces of calm. These effects have only been amplified as the pandemic-paralysis forces so many of us to cope through clicking.
In the world of the Internet, and particularly through their curated feeds, many people have tried to avoid the stress of “breaking news,” using these platforms to access self-care personalities and brands. Importantly, though, these spaces became what I’ll call micro-monopolies of influence where popular users leverage their followings for a kind of capitalist-communion, advocating first for their fans to invest in the goods and services that could be good for them. But, importantly, also because those goods and services are good according to a wider set or personally affirming values — ecological, no-harm, organic, vegan, fascist-free, you get the idea. By serving as distracting beacons of principles, influencers generate attachment among followers eager to feel grounded in and by something. That familiarity — or sense that your influencer is just like you — generates credibility. Further still, in the absence of expertise or information, these relationships generate trust — serving as a balm in a world rubbed raw by division.
Once these product-pastors raise their flocks, these spaces offer additional benefits. For some, it was a chance for people to “virtue signal” — a practice of public grandstanding to affirm one’s own moral soundness — which usually attracts additional followers anyway. This isn’t necessarily dangerous, of course, it’s community building.
But sometimes these communities become conduits — a kind of digital superhighway — connecting the eager with the righteous. They can serve as a point of recruitment and radicalization into some of the more perverse ideational cults that pepper our moral and political spectrum. In a practice I’ll call virtue-trading or virtue switching, the influencer’s moral or credibility capital is used to deliver their followers to a new or specific cause. Reports in recent years have unearthed how conspiracy theories have infiltrated the curated preserve of Instagram — QAnon, most recently. As one researcher explained:
The influencers were just doing what influencers do: follow the metrics. ‘If something interests you, and every time you post about it, you get more followers or subscribers, that’s helping you a lot.” Adding: “It’s not that they didn’t believe what they were posting. But, she adds, ‘we’re persuaded into what we believe a little more strongly by the response of those around us.
In these environments, pre-existing norms matter: these social spaces, where so many have flocked because of their fatigue from our media multiverse, are structured by doubt or scrutiny of traditional sources of authority. In short, if you can’t trust anyone you used to, you build trust somewhere else.
Wellness communities might be particularly susceptible to these influences, as they tend to emerge from underserved communities who desire alternative research and evidence that may provide relief. That critical attitude towards the “established” truth is also seen in anti-vaxxer communities who laud their commitment to “independent” research and their “better-informed” conclusions.
In short, and rooted deeply within these emerging spaces of misinformation, is a failure of education and practice. These examples should show us that social and political systems that undervalue public goods — fair, balanced, and independent news coverage, for instance — eventually destroy the foundations for a reasonable and responsible society. If we can’t agree on what counts as evidence and don’t trust those responsible for providing relevant and accurate information, we lose the ability to debate or discuss anything. After all, healthy civic life isn’t determinative of what you ought to think, but it does require we better understand how to think.
Trust me on this one.
What I’m Reading
Anne Applebaum in Coexistence is the Only Option - The Atlantic
Applebaum explores necessary steps in restoring the American democratic project, particularly as 10-15 percent of the population remains convinced Joseph R. Biden is the illegitimate president of the United States. Citing a range of interesting (and controversial) studies on dealing with political (and existential) differences (from Northern Ireland to Colombia), she also discusses the difficulty of getting access to those “true believers.” One notable comment, which speaks to some of the themes in previous newsletters:
Roderick Dubrow-Marshall, a psychologist who has written about the similarities between cults and extremist political movements, told me that in both cases, identification with the group comes to dominate people psychologically. “Other interests and ideas become closed off,” he said. “They dismiss anything that pushes back against them.” Remember, the people in the Capitol really believed that they were on a mission to save America, that it was patriotic to smash windows and kill and injure police. Before they can be convinced otherwise, they will have to see some kind of future for themselves in an America run by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and a Democratic Congress.
Coda for the Conscience
Since January 20, 2021, when the white-and-blue of Air Force One faded into the paling sky over Washington, many have taken a deep sigh of relief: Donald Trump was gone after the esoteric and passionless parting words: “Have a great life. We will be back soon.” Yet as Trumpism threatens a longer half-life, let us not, even for a moment, ignore the caustic and corrupt hate that patterned the background reality his politics. The words of Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing in The Atlantic in 2017, are just as important today:
To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.
Published Elsewhere
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