On election day, the red wave wasn’t the only noticeable absentee.
Think tankers, journalists from publications like the Associated Press and the Guardian, as well as statesmen like Barack Obama, observed the alleged swelling wave of political disinformation, but it was unable to breach the beach. The New York Times quotes disinformation academics who claim that many misinformation artists have failed to persuade voters that the electoral process is rigged and crooked.
Not for want of effort, though. Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist who claimed that the malfunctioning voting machines in Phoenix were intentional, urged for the arrest of election workers, as reported by the Times. Similar concerns were voiced by Donald Trump on his Truth Social. Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch, acknowledged to Reuters the day before the election that he had meddled in American elections previously and intended to do so again.
What can we learn from the failure of disinformation in 2022? It wouldn’t be the case if a significant portion of voters boycotted the polls because they believed the process to be such a charade. Instead, turnout was extremely high, virtually equal that of the previous midterm election. Has the process of dilution of misinformation improved for social media companies? Have voters learned to recognise false information? Or have we been overstating the negative consequences of misinformation ever since the 2016 presidential election?
Most likely, there is a little bit of each. Professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University David Karpf went against the norm in a late 2019 report by downplaying the impact of Russian disinformation on the 2016 election. Karpf came to the conclusion that disinformation merits our attention but not our preoccupation and that the 2016 Russian efforts had been somewhat of a failure. Activating activists and influencing voters is difficult, he noted, whereas creating social media engagements is simple.
Karpf humorously demonstrates the ridiculousness of using digital propaganda to “hack” the minds of the electorate in one section. Social media’s psychometric targeting strategies would undoubtedly be utilised to successfully persuade customers to make purchases like gym memberships if they were that effective. However, they aren’t. Why then do you think that such targeting might affect federal elections, which are held every two years and are therefore difficult to predict, but not gym memberships, which can be continually improved?
Karpf continues in his study by pointing out that historically, America has never had a well-informed populace, which has served to dull deception and propaganda. Do we really need to be concerned about the general public being exposed to misinformation if they aren’t paying enough attention to the “truth”?
Karpf discovers positive news while discussing deception in the context of today. “The majority of voters rejected the arguments made by Charlie Kirk and company. In an interview, he stated, “If Republicans decide that widespread misinformation hurts their political chances, that’s a step in the right direction. The shared narratives that will emerge from this election, especially within the Republican Party network, are still a little too early to predict.
Other causes for the 2022 disinformation failure include Trump’s silence, who is a serial liar. Before, he could campaign via Twitter and the White House. His exclusion from the most popular social media platforms during this election, together with the media’s disregard for him—which gives presidents, not ordinary citizens, saturation coverage of their every musing—muted his message.
It’s also possible that the electorate has grown tired of the conspiracy theories promoted by people like Trump and his pillow-selling supporter since they have never been provided with conclusive evidence of an election theft, as this Washington Post article shows. With COVID, inflation, growing crime, layoffs, and an approaching recession, which can all be proven false, as opposed to the election-fraud claims, people’s lives are already chaotic enough. Most people appear to have been persuaded by the social learning process to focus more on actual risks than imagined ones.
All of this is not meant to imply that the disinformation forest has been cleared. “I’ve long argued that the risk of misinformation and disinformation isn’t that it will significantly alter voter behaviour. It’s that it will persuade the political establishment that they can rule secretly, according to Karpf. On Tuesday, roughly half of the 370 candidates who had advocated for what they believed to be a “stolen” presidential election were elected. According to a liberal Center for American Progress report that was released prior to the election, misinformation can change and get worse after elections, as we saw after Trump’s defeat in 2020.
One person trying to make post-election disinformation worse than pre-election deception is Donald Trump. He pleaded with his followers to support him in stopping the “very obvious CHEATING” by Democrats in a Friday Truth Social post so that Republicans could win the Senate.
Well done, Donald. But how likely is it that a populace that rejected your lies during the 2020 election will accept them during the 2022 election?
It is true that all men are liars. What song by Nick Lowe is your favourite? Picks can be sent to Shafer.AWN@gmail.com. At the moment, no new email alert subscriptions are being honored. I need a Truth Social account for my Twitter feed. You should follow my Mastodon account. “Disinformation” is pronounced as “dezinformatsiya” in my RSS feed.
