Thread by @normative

I think a lot of disinfo flourishes by hitting a sweet spot: Too complicated to shoot down in a couple sentences, too obviously absurd to people with real expertise to be worth wasting time on, but superficially persuasive to people with no relevant background.

https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/1391033932246781960

Any actual infosec professional watching one of the PillowGuy videos is going to think: “Well, this is clearly moronic; none of my peers would be fooled by this, and I’d get no added cred with them wasting hours explaining each kindergarten error.”

It probably doesn’t seem URGENT to respond anyway—after all, none of your peers are fooled, and it’s not getting much MSM traction after the initial reports. But to a lot of normal people, all the technobabble sounds very impressive.

Stephen Pinker talks about the “knowledge curse” in the context of writing: It’s difficult to put yourself in the position of someone who doesn’t know what you do, especially if the knowledge is “basic” for your specialized area.

I suspect the “knowledge curse” means a lot of people with infosec or election security expertise watch a few minutes of PillowGuy’s movies, laugh, & think “nobody could be fooled by this.” Yet evidently many people are!

Of course, part of the problem is that many people want to be fooled. And it’s tough to get motivated to spend hours on a debunking when you think the people who need to see it won’t want to watch & will probably just choose to keep believing what they like anyway.

I’d add: I suspect a lot of the journalists who (correctly) call this stuff “baseless” or “debunked” do not themselves really understand why parts of it are wrong. And they need to in order to have any chance of translating from techie. Just saying “baseless” isn’t cutting it.