Thomas Klikauer and Nadine Campbell: How Trump Cranks Up His Misinformation Machine

July 28th 2020

President Trump Returns to the White House (The White House)

By Thomas Klikauer and Nadine Campbell

It has been said that Republicans and older Americans are more prone to read fake news, accidental misinformation and deliberate disinformation. They are also more likely to share unintentional misinformation and targeted disinformation once they find it credible and, more importantly, it fits into their worldview or ideology. This process works even better once a person has become part of a homogenous online group discussion and has entered what is known as an echo-chamber. This is where like-minded and ideologically consistent news is circulated and mirrored back onto people.

The longer people participate in such discussion groups, the more likely they will begin to trust misinformation and distribute what they read to others. It is more likely than unlikely that all this has influenced the 2016 presidential election. It was, perhaps, the first election in which disinformation and misinformation were more widely distributed than ever before. This has influenced not just Donald Trump's 2016 election but also has furthered the creation of scapegoats such as Donald Trump's Mexican rapist.

Simultaneously, it has normalised prejudice and hate crimes against anyone non-white. But it has led to low scale violence such as Pizzagate and high scale violence such as, Sandy Hook and the antisemitic Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting. The idea that Hillary Clinton was running a child pornography ring in a Washington pizza shop was an almost perfect example of deliberate and targeted disinformation. It may have been utter nonsense, there is no basement, and "cp" actually means cheese pizza and not child pornography. Still, the point is not so much to disprove conspiracy theories but to understand their political function: creating doubt, attacking a political candidate, and eliminating the border between fiction and reality.

Much of this is not new. Already in 1835, the New York Sun reported stories about life on the moon. In 1844, another newspaper said that Irish-Americans steal bibles from schools. In 1917, it was reported that Germany ran a corpse factory to distil glycerine. In 1983, it was believed that the US Army invented AIDS. Misinformation like this often entertains but also confuses and overwhelms the audience almost like the daily barrage of Trump Twitter messages. Much of this is designed to facilitate tribal thinking inside echo-chambers. This, in turn, leads to political polarisation. To a large extent, Donald Trump's misinformation is the ammunition for a large polarisation machine.

Increasingly, American arrange themselves in polarising camps based on political ideologies. Interestingly, US Democrats and Republicans are about 15% more likely to believe ideologically aligned headlines. This is only getting worse as less and less American receive news through networks and quality newspapers. Today, the majority of Americans get their news from so-called "social" networks which in reality are operated by large corporations and for the benefit of large corporations. Zuckerberg might like to tell everyone that he runs Facebook to connect people globally, but he still makes a handsome fee along the way.

In some sense, the news world has been "democratised" to an extreme degree. Anyone and everyone can run a blog, have a Twitter account – including Donald Trump – be on Facebook, and talk on TikTok and YouTube. All this is possible for people who have never taken a single course on journalism. While some self-appointed authors openly admit to doing this for money, others, like Alex Jones, Donald Trump, etc. do it for ideological reasons. They distribute misinformation for a specific purpose. Today, misinformation is almost entirely disseminated on social networks, most prominently on Facebook and Twitter – Trump’s preferred outlet.

In the three months leading up to Donald Trump’s election, the top-twenty misinformation and disinformation stories that appeared on Facebook, for example, were shared more frequently than the top-twenty real news stories. No wonder Donald Trump was elected "thanks to 80,000 people in three states", as the Washington Post noted. Many of them found online platforms engaging and entertaining. Inevitably, this will lead them towards finding misinformation supportive of Donald Trump. The same logic applies to particular information presenting a particular political ideology.

Misinformation machines only enhance this because their algorithms do not discriminate between the quality of information presented and misinformation. They can efficiently insulate users in echo-chambers where disagreeable messages are hardly ever encountered. Instead, individuals are fed a constant smorgasbord of uncontested political information and misinformation, which can easily polarize attitudes.

Surprisingly, one finds that the overall number of fake news stories is rather small in terms of volume. Nonetheless, they remain widely distributed and are circulated on Facebook and Twitter. Still, many individuals are likely to absorb misinformation because human beings seem to be hard-wired to trust familiar sources, especially when these confirm already existing world views.

In turn, it is more likely that the messages we receive from unfamiliar sources are ignored, especially when they challenge existing views. Solomon Ash has shown in the 1950s, that people have a desire to be accurate and correct. But more importantly, Ash also demonstrated that people are overwhelmingly more motivated to be accepted by a group. Human beings are, almost by nature, socially bound group members. Human beings are social beings – not neoliberals and definitely not Ayan Rand's hyper-individuals. We want to belong, and we want to fit in. Hence, FIFO – Fit in or f*** off! 

To be part of the Republican Party, for example, is a strong motivator to consume misinformation. During the 2016 election, Republicans were less likely to seek fact-checking compared to Clinton supporters. Not surprisingly, the overwhelming number of online misinformation painted Donald Trump in a positive light while attacking Hillary Clinton. It is reflective of what a George W. Bush's staffer once said,

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do"

In other words, we can study reality like Donald Trump's misinformation machine judiciously while Donald Trump is president. Above that, demagogues like Alex Jones not only back Donald Trump, they also create a political universe based on misinformation. Both are individuals who seek out, create, and simply invent information and misinformation that reinforces their ideological preferences. Furnished by Fox News, people like Alex Jones, Donald Trump, and others have created a gigantic misinformation machine that works like a vast echo-chamber constantly and consistently reinforcing a reactionary world view.

This misinformation machine constantly feeds a hungry crowd. Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of those who consume misinformation is found among conservative readers. Republicans are more likely to share misinformation compared to Democrats. Worse, citizens cannot be expected to make rational decisions and correctly vote when their judgement on which they base their actions is founded on fabricated information, misinformation, and even deliberate disinformation, i.e. propaganda – now called public relations. 

Things are getting even worse when one realises that most people get their news from (anti) social networks and that these sites and platforms have a substantial impact on democracy. Based on Donald Trump's misinformation machine, today Republicans are more likely to believe that there is voter fraud than Democrats and Independents. This does not look hopeful for November 2020.

Last time around, Facebook admitted, about a year after the 2016 election, that Russian-produced misinformation reached 150 million Americans more than the entire 138 million US voting population. Many of these are among the 26% of Americans that the Annenberg Public Policy Center found not to be able to name all three branches of government. 

In the end, it appears that we have handed over a substantial part of democracy to a misinformation machine that shapes people's attitudes. Simultaneously, quality newspapers are in decline while Fox has outranked quality TV. Murdoch's Fox marks the triumph of tabloid-TV. Any democracy that hands over vital parts of its system to misinformation machines exposes itself to the dangers of being a failed democracy.

Jamaican-born Nadine Campbell and German-born Thomas Klikauer live and work in Sydney, Australia.