Marc Ambinder Profile picture
Senior fellow @uscannenberg | Author of The Brink | meditation, national security, cats,🖖,🏳️‍🌈. Policy @tiktok_us

Sep 30, 2020, 6 tweets

I used to think that the @JoeBiden campaign had no counter disinformation strategy. Now I think that the President’s disinformation avalanche has had the effect of rebutting and limiting itself, to some degree, because it has maxed out its plausible audience. However ....

It has still has an enormous unhealthy effect on the public health and voting integrity. The result of disinformation campaigns is usually paralysis and confusion, layered in with fear and aversion to norms. People who aren’t in the President’s audience have also suffered.

It has become an existential question: how can one possibly create a national counter disinformation campaign when the TOP of the information chain is the main vector of misinformation? One can’t... one CAN surgically create campaigns around specific issues.

Perhaps the President’s efforts are so over the top and so at odds with reality that at a certain point they burn out. Perhaps they encourage more virulent behavior from adherents, knowing that they can’t grow an audience. The existing audience radicalizes to the point of parody

And parody can be biting. This one is. People are confused about the vote, about vaccines, about health advice... I don’t think there is anything Biden can do, other than to avoid amplification and focus on very specific concerns (mail in ballots in X states) to counter Trump.

The President’s R0 may be less than 1 at this point. But the virulence and harmfulness of some of what he says ensures widespread community panic.

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