About a month ago, as I was browsing twitter, I stumbled upon the following article by Cathy Young:
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/the-making-of-the-maga-hoax-about
At the time, talk about pet-eating Haitian immigrants was all over twitter. Donald Trump had just referenced it in the latest presidential debate, and his his running mate, J.D. Vance had tweeted about it. It was fascinating how the story played out. Every day, I would see a new story that supposedly validated the claim. Also every day, I would find that an earlier story had been debunked. Either it wasn’t about a Hatian, wasn’t about an immigrant, wasn’t in Springfield, or wasn’t about a pet getting eaten. The article seemed like it would be an interesting read.
Early on in the article, I came across the following paragraph:
It started with an X hatefest I happened to catch at the outset. On Sept. 7, a full three days before the debate, I saw left-wing-crank-turned-right-wing-loon Naomi Wolf share a post from misinformation superspreader End Wokeness (an account that may be run by far-right troll and Pizzagater Jack Posobiec), containing what seemed like an obviously made-up story: “ducks and pets” in Springfield, Ohio being gobbled up by Haitian migrants. The evidence: an anonymized Facebook post about a “neighbor’s friend’s daughter” who had seen her lost cat being carved up by the Haitians next door. I decided to post a sarcastic comment, unaware that I was wading into a dumpster fire.
Nothing about this paragraph is factually incorrect as far as I know, but something in there caught my eye: “Misinformation superspreader End Wokeness”
I am familiar with the End Wokeness twitter account. They’re pretty prominent on twitter, and they are not exactly what I would call trustworthy. I can understand why they might be described as an misinformation superspreader. That characterization isn’t entirely wrong, but even so, it put me on alert.
I think what I’m sensitive to is the way this pattern judges a thing at the same time it’s introduced. It wants me to make up my mind about who End Wokeness is before I’ve had the chance to evaluate them and come to my own conclusion.
When I see that pattern, it always puts me on alert. I’m so sensitive to it, that it sticks out like a sore thumb even in articles that I’m predisposed to agree with (like this one). “Misinformation superspreader” isn’t the only example of it here; “hatefest” “left-wing-crank-turned-right-wing-loon” and “far-right troll” are all examples of this pattern.
Furthermore, it’s trying to persuade me of something without being an actual argument. It’s like when a movie plays sinister music just to let me know that a character supposed to be bad. If I didn’t already know who End Wokeness was, I shouldn’t just take Cathy’s word for it that they’re a misinformation superspreader. Any writer can introduce someone with whatever label they want to, regardless of whether or not it’s accurate.
It also indicates bias. It makes Cathy seem predisposed to be against them. With an introduction like that, it seem unlikely that she would give them a fair shake. It may be that they don’t deserve a fair shake, but I still need to get my bearings as a reader. I can’t always be expected to already know who they are, and I need a way to validate their trustworthiness for myself.
Right-wing publications do this too. I think that Cathy herself would be sensitive to it in these cases. Take this passage for instance:
Just when you think the barrel-bottom standards at Politico cannot get any more bottomer or barreler, the disgraced outlet publishes talking points from a man who is not only facing murder charges, but who is alleged to have tried to commit one of the worst crimes imaginable: assassinating an individual who represents the will, hope, and future of tens of millions of Americans — and I would say the same about Kamala Harris had she been a target.
Does that seem like a reliable narrator to you? Do you think they’ll accurately present what the Politico really said? I know I wouldn’t trust them after reading the above paragraph. You can read the full article here.
I’m sure this sort priming is persuasive to some people. That’s probably why It’s so common. Still, it makes me feel skeptical, and I think for good reason. When I get skeptical like this, I’ll occasionally have the patience to go thorough the article, validating and double-checking the whole way through. Most of the time, however, I’m not that motivated, and I will probably decide the article isn’t worth engaging with.
This is a phenomenon I’ve been meaning to write about for some time. I don’t have anything against Cathy young, but when I read the article, the pattern really just jumped out at me, and it seemed like a good anchor point for this article. It’s an even more interesting case due to the fact that it’s an article that I essentially agree with, which means my aversion to it was pure sensitivity to the pattern, and not bias against the content itself.
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Notes -
I applaud this writeup, and just want to share something on Cathy Young herself. I have a... fond?... opinion of her, as she was someone I used to read more of last decade.
Cathy Young, not to be confused with the Demcratic senatory Catherine Young who often goes by Cathy in media, is as an older-school republican, the sort most concerned with government proceduralism and how rule of law is handled (treating all people equally). She was an earlier opponent of progressive excess, and as a female journalist of clearly conservative leanings, she was able to carve a niche by being the contrarian to the expected demographic alignment (i.e. a jewish woman who was not a progressive democratic partisan for social justice).
Back then, and in the early Trump, she was something of a 'sane moderate' writer, who was sympathetic enough to give a fair hearing (and presentation) to rightwing people she personally clearly did not fully agree with, while resisting / calling out the excesses of leftwing actors who would be undoubtable in progressive media. She took some public stances that won her no friends, and contributed to her exile to the substack realm, where the sort of quippy/zippy/unprofessional judgments you speak of is more or a survival strategy since that's what the subscribers pay for. If you ever look at the venues she wrote for, you can see shifts by the presidential administration.
Two examples of the classic Cathy that stood out was that she was a relatively clear opponent of the Obama administration's zeitgast rape culture- with articles such as The Injustice of the 'Rape Culture' Theory- and in another she took a large stab at a major progressive media pinata, with the article (Almost) Everything You Know About GamerGate Is Wrong.
Cathy made some harsh critics with those articles, but they were also very much progressive cows she gored, so when I was reading OP's initial post I was surprised when I thought he was perceiving a left-wing bias. Looking back at those articles, though, it's also clear that she has always been rather... opinionated? Or at least very clear on her opinions on matter. The subtitle of the Rape-Culture article, after all, is "For those in the grips of hysteria, proof is the enemy," and her opinion on the Colombia University matress girl saga is similarly unsubtle.
Of course, she also gores in other directions. Cathy is an older-style Republican at heart, and while she rose in conservative media circles for her willingness (eagerness?) to oppose progressivism, her star fell with her opposition to Trump, proof that going sacred cows comes with drawbacks if you gore 'your' side. I don't recall her being an example of Trump Derangement Syndrome in the extreme, but she could reasonably be considered a Never Trump republican, or at least one who is far more down than up. You can read her thoughts on the initial Trump cabinet, and while it's clear she has some strong opinions, and doesn't intent to recant them, it's also notable that she at least tries to note counter-balancing points and doesn't go full doomer. (I believe her general position is 'Trump is bad and high-risk, but checks and balances can constrain the worst.')
In that respect, I'd chalk her up to the same category as the comments on Marina Hyde and Glenn Greenwald- being opinionated is part of her brand. You're not 'wrong' if it sets off your manipulation allergies, but it's less an attempt at subtle manipulation and more a result of her brand being one built on long repetition / expectation of similar tracks.
I follow Cathy on twitter, and generally like her. I also think she's almost entirely right about the substance of her article. She just did the thing in this article, and it stood out so much that it was a perfect example.
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totally agree. I have been like this since the 90's so I basically can't listen or read anyone anymore. Everyone feels compelled to inject their snappy wordplay, Russel Conjugations and pejoratives into whatever crass culture war topic they choose to wade in on. It /feels/ like this has gotten intolerably bad on the left recently, but it may also be that no one cares to try and articulate things honestly and fairly and jsut want to "score points." It's bad out there, folks.
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In a vacuum I agree with you but then I realise I really enjoy Marina Hyde for the Guardian, who is a phenomenal prose stylist and puts her biases on the page in something like this manner. She is funny, verbally inventive and scathing enough that you (or I) can enjoy it for what it is without mistaking it for news. You have to be good at it though, it doesn't work if you try to do a news article with five semi-amusing phrases thrown in just for spice.
You know, this reminds me of Glenn Greenwald. For the longest time I would read his invectives against Sam Harris during their spats over the War on Terror, and I could barely wrap my mind around how unprofessional and unhinged he sounded.
It was only in the last 5 years I heard him speak, and realized he's just a sassy gay, and he writes how he speaks. Now I find his constant invective against the military industrial complex hilarious.
Maybe chalk it up to another case of taking someone literally and not seriously, versus seriously and not literally.
Greenwald came immediately to my mind too. It's hard to dismiss him though when he's been pointing at the same phenomena and people for 20 years. You kind of get why he's so sassy.
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No, definitely not, and I dislike that style. But at least it makes it clear that the narrator is not to be trusted, and that they are not reputable. I kind of feel like the even more insidious style is when the narrator doesn't include little jibes like that, but basically comes just short of doing it. I think most modern, reputable news sources do this, and thus maintain a veneer of impartiality, while still managing to steer the readers' perceptions whichever way they want by being very selective about which facts they share, how they subtly prime the readers' view of those facts, and which quotes they include.
I think my favorite examples of this were the very passively, neutrally written articles about people facing backlash for saying or doing things. But the article were be these very blank descriptions of very biased quotes from activist. So you read 500 or so words where the author is ostensibly keeping their hands clean just including other people's unhinged angry quotes, and then the article ends. And you go "That's it?! I started reading this article because I wanted to know what this guy said/did and you never even told me!" Naturally when you actually look up what was said or done, it was nothing. Maybe something phrased slightly awkwardly that allowed a twitter activist to invent some new micro aggression for their own 15 minutes of fame.
That said, I haven't seen that format of article for a few years now. I think it died off some time around when Elon bought Twitter and the culture of it changed significantly.
Quote laundering. If you want to say something that's not, strictly speaking, true, you can just quote somebody else saying it.
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You know, a fascinating post-script to the whole "Haitian are ruining Springfield Ohio" claim...
Yes, what started off with salacious stories about immigrants eating pets morphed into more defensible claims about mass migration overrunning local institutions and destroying the quality of life for residents who've been attached to the area for generations.
Yes, many local political leaders came out, even Republican political leaders, to denounce the claims that Haitians are eating pets.
Springfield Ohio also flipped red in the election in a major way.. Biggest Republican margin in 40 years, and that's only because the records only go back to 1984 when Reagan won 49/50 states, and Trump had a bigger margin than that in Clark County.
So, when we are trying to decide who the liars are, it seems likely that Trump and Vance were speaking closer to the truth, even if the specifics were off, than everyone else screaming "THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE! Actually everyone loves that one out of every three people in their town is now a 70 IQ third worlder on welfare!"
That's generally my impression of Trump and the Maga phenomenon in general. Most of what they say is technically false, but an exaggerated version of something true and important. The Truth is 1, Trump says 2, his supporters say 3, and the Democrats/media say -3.
You can't literally take them at their word, but as tentative allies we might make some progress in that direction, which is better than the opposite.
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The most common type of Democrat position isn't that Springfieldians overwhelmingly love the Haitian immigrants, it's that those Springfieldians who dislike the immigrants should change their minds and like them because the immigrants are objectively good for the community and in any case, even if they weren't, it is still good to let them into the country.
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Your understanding of ‘the truth’ probably came from another guy’s statement where ‘the specifics were off’ too and it didn’t matter to him either. You denounce democrats when they lie, make their lies responsible for loss of trust in their institutions and their electoral defeat, but lying in favour of your side, that just works?
I honestly don't even understand what you are attempting to say. Let me make myself as clear as possible.
The Republican position was "having almost 30% of your town become third worlders on welfare overnight sucks" and the Democrat position was "Having almost 30% of your town become third worlders on welfare overnight is awesome!"
The people in the town who can vote, voted by a nearly unprecedented margin "Yeah nah, it sucks". Like, that's not a lie with the specifics off. There was an actual vote, with actual numbers! We can check!
Were the stories about specific ways it sucks to have your town overrun by barbarians from a distant country inaccurate? Yeah. Were the stories about how totally well adjusted and harmonious everything is also inaccurate? Clearly. But the fundamental question of "Does this suck?" was overwhelmingly answered.
You’re grasping for the truth, clamoring for something to hold on to. It doesn’t prove that having haitians sucks. Springfield just voted that way, allegedly. And the legitimacy of the vote is something Trump has repeatedly attacked. He claimed ‘the actual numbers we can check’ were false. In that lie, those were the specifics that were off, which you dismiss here. In order to justify one lie, to diminish the truth-value of one statement, you have to rely on on the truth value of another statement, which your side has already destroyed. Lying’s been sawing the branch you’re sitting on.
I’m not a fan of haitian immigration. I’d just like to understand what you two (deep blue and deep red) are doing. You both apparently think lying is fine and advantageous for you, but immoral or counterproductive for the other.
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I suppose we'll never know, but I wonder if in sum the "Eating the pets" thing helped or hurt Trump. My inclination is that it was brilliant subversion of the whole "debunking" culture, weaponizing it against unwitting Democrats, very possibly knowingly by Vance. You tell a salacious story that is intentionally in part false, knowing that it will be simply irresistible to Deboonkers who will only aid you in spreading the story which has a kernel of truth that ultimately helps you. At the end of the day, even if they didn't eat the cats, I think the idea that some random NGO can dump 20,000 Haitians on your small middle-America town is extremely disturbing and ultimately the debunkers only helped spread this fact.
I wanted to write something about this, maybe it's still worth doing a retrospective.
When the news first got out the left went into full "delay, deny, denounce" mode as they fell back. Noah Smith was claiming the Haitians didn't even exist, then that there's no way that many of them were on welfare, and finally anyway why do you care racist?!
Those delaying tactics work if they make you haggle over every step, proving the Haitians are really there, spending another six weeks digging up docs on who brought them, and whoops the public lost interest a month ago and Noah Smith is sneering about how you're so obsessed with this Haitian thing.
This is a pattern that played out millions of times fighting the left between 2008 and now. "It's not happening and anyway you deserved it" is just a specific form of the general mode of propaganda warfare they perfected with their dominance over the media.
Trump was the guy who discovered that you can ram a lance right into the center of the boil so everyone can watch it burst. Suddenly the enemy are dug in defending territory you bypassed hours ago, still doggedly insisting that "no reliable sources admit X", even as their reinforcements have shifted to a "Republicans pounce on X" counter-offensive, abandoning the old front line entirely. Night after night their newscasters have that panicked Baghdad Bob look as they back peddle while lashing out in frustration. Their lies become obvious, and more importantly they look weak.
It's a wonderful way of exploiting the distributed hive-mind nature of the left. Even when all their journalists are coordinating messaging on JournoList, they can't react fast enough because their command network is so bloated and cobbled together out of the rotting remains of skinsuited institutions, often still working at cross-purposes to each other. Sometimes a biological component whose still half-digested brain was hiding shreds of journalistic integrity will even throw a foot out and stagger the beast.
I think we're already seeing evolution towards a new, centralized party-controlled media in response. For example, the Dems have put billions into that network of fake "local news" sites that all publish AI-written variations on the same press release, which in turn get posted to reddit and bluesky for bots to comment on. This bypasses existing institutions that they can only influence rather than control outright in real time, such as the New York Times (which the left have now turned on savagely). At least in the short run this will make them much stronger and more agile, and they will become as adept at parrying Trump-like attacks as late-WW2 armies were at countering blitzkrieg tactics.
It follows the general theme of the cathedral shifting from soft power to directly-wielded hard power as challengers arise.
Just saw some supporting quotes from semafor:
Always feels like you're well-calibrated when the monster you've been analyzing turns round and describes its behavior the exact same way you did, but with a smiley face drawn on the shoggoth mask.
Jesus Christ.
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I think this is an underappreciated point, and I suspect it even reflects a psychological difference between the right and left wing's approach to empiricism.
I'll even 'steelman' Pizzagate, for that matter.
We've seen plenty of credible reports and even some actual convictions showing that Politicians do in fact get up to all kinds of sexual deviancy, up to and including in the halls of congress.
And now we're seeing the various dominoes falling with Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell (remember they found her hanging out in New Hampshire surrounded by armed guards?), Diddy, and Jay-Z, and we can be all but certain there's celebs and politicians caught up in all this. The biggest hit song of the summer was by Kendrick Lamar accusing one of the most popular musical artists alive right now of being a pedophile.
Pizzagate gets the specifics wrong (there's probably no child dungeon underneath a pizza restaurant) but is still getting at the 'shape' of the truth. And if they kept fumbling around in a very misguided attempt to uncover these truths, they'd probably grab hold of the actual conspiracies eventually, and bring some heinous stuff to light.
Whereas the lefty impulse seems to be to reject the existence of a given conspiracy simply because some aspect of it is debunked or proven false. "Haha silly Qanon thinks there's a Pedo ring operating out of a Pizza shop, how stupid to believe that politicians would be hiding an organized child sex operation." And thus they don't have to follow that thought any further and can return to blissful ignorance, which would allow whatever hidden activities are occurring to continue along.
This was especially blatant with the Hunter Biden laptop stuff. Its utterly obvious the Biden family is covering up some serious stuff, and the more recent pardons are almost tacit admissions of such, but the liberals have their head jammed so deep in the sand that they denied Biden's senility, let alone his potential corruption, for so long it may have just cost them control of government.
Likewise, maybe there are at best isolated incidents of Haitian immigrants taking animals they find outdoors and cooking them up in Ohio. But the larger point that they're causing, e.g. increased traffic accidents and increased burden on social services and possibly crowding out the locals for employment is likely more true than not.
it seems obvious that Haitians really do eat dogs and cats in Haiti (Those links are SFL, but there ARE videos out there if you wish to be convinced further), so the larger point the righties are making is getting at the shape of the truth.
The lefties, of course, will use the debunking of individual incidents to claim that Haitian immigrants are causing no issues whatsoever and we should be inviting more of them in.
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This sort of characterization in writing has been bugging me a long time. I agree, it must be persuasive or enjoyable to some people, given how common it is, but I just can't get into it, probably for the same reason I don't like political cartoons. They feel condescending, the author either not trusting their readers to come to the right conclusion and trying to hammer it home with an egregious caricature, or else the author feeling insecure in how they might be perceived and doing the same thing to signal the right tribal allegiance.
As an aside, specifically with the case of calling things "misinformation", I think authors should almost never do it. It immediately stakes a claim that the author 1. knows in some cosmic sense, that the alleged misinfo is false, and 2. knows that the intent of the alleged misinfo was to deceive or bullshit. Even if they know the first, how could they know the second?
Yep.
"Misinformation" is a label that should really only apply to statements that intentionally mislead with regard to facts that have been heavily empirically tested and can be 'independently' verified by the listeners if they chose to do so. In most other situations, you can just say "lies."
"The sun rises in the west" is misinformation, in that context, even if the speaker ardently believes it. "The earth is 6000 years old" is arguably not.
There's a distinct difference between expressing skepticism over someone's statement and taking it upon yourself to declare that statement is untrue without further elaborating on your argument.
And sneaking your conclusion (this statement is false/this speaker is unreliable) into your description of the person or statement is, itself, a very misleading thing to do, if you haven't done the work to back up the description.
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I think it sticks out to us because most of us are at least open to conservative ideas, and really, bed of the left control over media and academia, it’s something that is used against either us or people like us to suggest that we or people like us are to be shunned or at least ignored. Those farther left don’t notice it except on conservative sources (which as not considered real news by leftists) so they don’t really notice it.
I do notice it, and I notice other forms of loaded language — terms like genocide, atrocity, militia or militant, Nationalist (whether white or Christian), these are not descriptions, they’re propaganda designed to sneakily tell you what to think about a subject indirectly by loading the story with sneers instead of facts.
The difference in priming language employed is that the right coopts the new terms created by the left, whereas the left redefines existing words with the necessary moral valence. The right calls things Woke, DEI, Affirmative Action etc as adjectives for leftist programs, the left calls things Genocide to force a false equivalency. Ireland asking the ICJ to redefine genocide just to make sure Israel is convicted of the charge is the clearest sign of terms being degraded and coopted for the existing moral value of the term instead of the acts meeting the standard. Mitt Romney was already fascist in 2012, and that card is already played. Chud is the preferred term of the left now, but literally no one thinks that term has negative connotations because no one actually watched that movie.
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AIUI, this is the characteristic of disinformation. From dictionary.com "“Misinformation” vs. “Disinformation”: Get Informed On The Difference":
…
My personal favorite in this area, though, is "malinformation."
Harmful opinions
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So this gives us four quadrants along two axes, right? The true/false axis and the benevolent/malevolent axis.
True and benevolent - information. Facts offered with the intent of illuminating another person or improving their understanding.
False and benevolent - some (but not all) misinformation. Offered with the intent of improving someone else's understanding, but failing in this regard due to good-faith error.
True and malevolent - malinformation. Facts offered in order to harm another or decrease their overall understanding, whether through selective choice of facts, removal of context, inflammatory content, or similar.
False and malevolent - disinformation (a subtype of misinformation). Offered with the intent of deluding another, decreasing their understanding, or causing them to take action based on false foundations.
I crept the whole enterprise is dubious. Who gets to decide what is true or not (god knows a lot of info turned out to be misinformation and a lot of misinformation turned out to be information)?
But even if we get that point, who gets to decide what is helpful info and what is hurtful true info? And what if the very process of deciding what is helpful info and hurtful info is hurtful? Also is disinformation against malinformation good?
The whole concept is designed simply for one side to censor the other side. It isn’t an honest inquiry but rotten from top to bottom.
I can't argue with that. I think a schema like this is reasonable in the abstract, but the moment you start positing regulating information on this basis, you run into the question of who judges.
I don't know if I have an absolute rule here, because it seems in principle reasonable for a government to act to curtail certain forms of false information (e.g. false advertising), as well as certain forms of malevolent communication (e.g. propaganda fron an enemy power), but I think I would want to permit those only to the minimum extent necessary.
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Definitions I've seen vary between that and "truth that causes harm" absent a requirement of malevolence.
To me that seems much too broad, particularly since 'harm' is difficult to clearly define, and no one can reasonably foresee all the effects of their speech. For instance, is it malinformation for Lisa Simpson to tell Springfield that their beloved founder was a murderous pirate? It's true, and her intent is to promote historical truth and increase everyone's genuine knowledge of the past - her motive is disinterested truth-seeking, not to promote or conceal any political agenda. However, it's also clear that the knowledge will make most of the townspeople unhappy. Malinformation? What if the truth would do such damage to the town's annual festival as to cause real economic damage? That seems like real harm, at least in an economic sense. Malinformation?
Intuitively I feel like to be malinformation there has to be a motive that is, broadly speaking, malevolent - it has to be true information that is intended to in some way mislead or disadvantage the people receiving it, usually to further the agenda of the person revealing it.
My understanding is that many or perhaps most (though not all) of the people going around using (rather than critiquing) the term "malinformation" are basically using it as a dysphemism for "truth that damages the Narrative" - the Swedish study that showed immigrants committed more crime than native-borns, for instance.
Obviously, I oppose these people's efforts to stigmatise and censor inconvenient truths.
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