Thread by @normative

One reason this belief is sticky is that press (understandably) keep saying there’s “no evidence” of fraud. What there actually is, is a huge amount of terrible “evidence” of fraud. All of which is easily—but in the aggregate not briefly—debunked.

https://twitter.com/srl/status/1388192741184745476

So CNN says “no evidence” and people disposed to believe say: “Aha, they won’t even address all the proofs I saw in Mike Pillow’s videos & on OAN & in Parler threads.” And if you do address some, there are a dozen other ones you didn’t, or you didn’t address every aspect, etc.

An overloaded information ecosystem is a great petri dish for motivated reasoning, because even if enough people with the relevant legal or procedural or technical expertise take on the thankless task of refuting all this stuff, no normal person actually has time to read it.

I mean, I did a couple threads debunking some of the absurd technical claims about cyberattacks & some posts about voting machines, as did a handful of techies, but I only saw a few efforts to pick that stuff apart in detail, partly because it’s so OBVIOUSLY absurd to techies.

But they people who buy this stuff don’t see the granular explanation, and they aren’t disposed to trust a conclusory “MSM” assertion that there’s “no evidence” or that some particular claim has been “debunked,” especially when the outlet hasn’t itself done a detailed debunking.

This might, by the way, be something a wiki could at least attempt to handle, on the charitable assumption it would make a difference. If a lot of people with expertise only need to make small individual contributions, you might be able to construct a debunking clearinghouse.

There does seem to be a kind of Gresham’s Law of expertise at work here. The time of well-credentialed infosec professionals is valuable. Why spend a day of billable hours explaining basics to an audience that’s going to fall back on social trust for the dude in the pillow video?

Once institutional credibility filters stop mattering, the people who know the least are always going to win on sheer output, if only because their time isn’t worth anything. Recognition of which further reduces the output of people who know something.