Donald Trump launches an insane hoax (immigrants eat pets) before an audience of 67 million people and, despite it (or because of it), wins the elections. We must take fake news seriously and stop just being shocked by them or treating them as a strange pathology, because they are not. They have a political intention, they are not neutral, they have biases, they are intentional and I intend to prove it to you; something I tried last month in the Commission for the democratic audit in Parliament, I don’t know if it was very successful..
I argued there that there is already enough scientific literature to prove the aforementioned intention and, to do so, I propose to start not with who invents the fake news, but who believes it, that is, to what public it is directed.
Who believes fake news?
An enlightening study, whose reading I suggest: “Who believes the fake news? Identification of political asymmetries“ set out to understand who is most vulnerable to fake news by comparing 40 studies published in Europe and the US and after doing so, they found a very revealing political asymmetry. They conclude: “Most studies agree that conservative or right-wing audiences are more vulnerable to fake news. […] In Europe, belief in fake news is positively associated with people on the right, especially the radical right and right-wing authoritarianism.“.
Neither the studies nor the author are stating that conservative or radical right-wing people are more gullible. What we claim is that they are more vulnerable to fake news because They are their target audience: they are aimed at them.
How do they work?
The study cited finds a cause in which “Motivated reasoning seems stronger and more active among conservatives”. Let’s focus on what motivated reasoning is because, believe me, it’s relevant:
There is a human cognitive bias whereby all people believe that we are right. Motivated reasoning explains that, due to this bias, people are more sensitive to accepting inputs into our lives that reinforce our beliefs and, on the contrary, we are more reluctant to those that challenge or contradict them. What fake news does is manipulate motivated reasoning by biasing its audiences. They are aimed at people who may see their previous ideas reinforced and, therefore, be more vulnerable to believing them. The echo chambers of social networks are perfect for this manipulation. And they are achieving it.
Does Fake News influence the vote?
Yes. The case of Cambridge Analytica and its influence on Brexit in 2016 is well known, biasing audiences by sending fake news about the EU filling the United Kingdom with immigrants and stealing money from the national health system.
In 2017, German researchers analyzed “A survey on the origins and consequences of believing misinformation in the 2017 German parliamentary elections” in which they found that “Due to his disruptive and right-wing politics, this news apparently alienated Christian Democrat voters and, in particular, led them to vote for the AfD. Misinformation beliefs were apparently one of the reasons for the electoral success of right-wing populists in the elections“. That is, they do play a role in the radicalization of discourses towards the extreme right and they do so globally; therefore, the question is pertinent:
Does Fake News influence political parties?
Yes. It is the great debate in the European conservative parties that have gone from the cordon sanitaire to the extreme right to doubt whether or not to adapt to their most radical proposals. It also affects social democracy, which is more inclined today to harden its position on migration, lower feminist demands or accept far-right European commissioners.
What’s more, it also affects the left, as exemplified by the case of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) in Germany, a split from The Left that was created with the publicized intention of disputing votes for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) through a harsh anti-immigration speech. But it has not happened: in the September elections in three landers, BSW obtained a good result (around 13%) but its voters came overwhelmingly from the left, social democracy and liberals; only 6% of them were former AfD voters, which brings us to the next question:
Is it politically useful to temporize hate speech?
In 2022, the University of Cambridge published decisive research on this question: “Does temporizing work? Strategies of the majority parties and the success of the radical right parties” in which they analyzed no more and no less than 70 elections in Western Europe between 1976 and 2017. The object was to detect whether to subtract votes from the extreme right it is a good strategy to accommodate or compromise with any of its postulates and its results were categorical: “We find no evidence that accommodative strategies reduce support for the radical right. If anything, our results suggest that they cause more voters to defect to the radical right.”“.
And I could continue citing studies… because it is already an undeniable reality: To reduce the advance of the extreme right, it is not useful to temporize with it and it is something that, unfortunately, crosses politics and, in an excessive manner, the media that follow their agenda and whitewash fake news by treating it generically as “disinformation”, as if they were based on a varied ideological range. or they were a product of the individual pathology of the influencer on duty, so let’s make it clear:
Fake news promotes hate speech and these follow the five favorite themes of far-right ideology: those who relate immigration to insecurity, feminism to attacks on men, democracy to misgovernment, conspiracies and scientific denialism. That is their media agenda, which they repeat in a compulsive, Goebbelian way, with dramatic political implications; but I sense that there is more.
I am concerned and alert you because after studying the phenomenon I suspect that what they intend, ultimately, It is the social acceptance of an authoritarian government.
#believes #fake #news #political #reading
