Thread by @davetroy

1/Adding to my thread from yesterday, the loss of social ties is our primary ongoing challenge with respect to disinformation.

Any other approaches that we might pursue depend on us addressing social division meaningfully. So for example, people talk about "education"...

2/And point to countries like Finland, which teaches kids about disinformation. But it is a very different country that has been dealing with Russian disinfo, well, forever. It is also much more culturally homogenous, and much smaller. Its social divisions are quite different.

3/Frankly, I have listened to MAGA people with masters degrees and PhD's explain in full cultish glory about the cabal. And I have heard people with bizarre political beliefs give very educated, nuanced treatises on complicated topics. "Education" isn't specifically the problem.

4/Instead, people have a bias that if they appear to be in an out-group and doing things that seem nonsensical, they must be "uneducated." What they are is subject to influence — as we all are. We must all understand that we are influenced by our own networks.

5/Sometimes people use the term "low-information voter." This also is inaccurate. No one today compared to 30 years ago can be considered to be "low-information." We are awash in information; the problem is that much of it is in service of influence campaigns.

6/This, once again, is a way of "othering" people who are in the out-group and who we wish weren't. People routinely use the internet to research vast, complex webs of facts to arrive at conclusions that are unsupported or that comport with social desires.

7/That brings us to "critical thinking" and how we just need to teach more of it, right? Evidence is mixed. The same drive to "dig deeper" and "do your own research" is weaponized by influence campaigns. "Critical thinking" can be used to support motivated social reasoning.

8/And of course there's always "intelligence"; the idea that some people are just stupid and that is what's causing them to take on absurd beliefs. There isn't a lot of evidence to support that, and indeed there is plenty of counterfactual evidence.

9/We are facing two distinct tasks, 1) halting the destruction of additional social ties, 2) rebuilding what's been lost in the extensive fire that's already occurred.

Again, putting out the fire won't salvage what's been burned. And we still must put out the fire.

10/If I manage to get one idea across, it's that healthy social connections are a baseline requirement and dependency for nearly all other remedies we may wish to pursue. And this problem is especially acute in the United States, even as other countries face similar challenges.

11/Because intelligent, high-information, educated people who employ critical thinking are every bit as susceptible to influence and cultish social configurations as anyone else.

Ergo, only curbing the formation of cultish networks is a solution.

Here's one piece that explores this, with links to research.
nytimes.com/2021/02/18/opi…