Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

Watch Boris Johnson describe in detail Steve Bannon's strategy of 'flooding the zone with shit'.

In 2018, Bannon said: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

dorseteye.com/boris-johnson-…

No matter how clear a case opposition parties or other critics of Boris Johnson & the Government make, Bannon's strategy means no single version of the truth is ever going to be accepted. This fact underscores a serious problem for our democratic culture. vox.com/policy-and-pol…

No amount of evidence, on virtually any topic, is likely to move public opinion one way or the other.

We can attribute some of this to rank partisanship — some people simply refuse to acknowledge inconvenient facts about their own side.

But there’s another problem: we live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information. Some of that information is accurate, some of it is bogus, & much of it is intentionally misleading. The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the truth.

As Sabrina Tavernise & Aidan Gardiner put it in a NYT piece, “people are numb & disoriented, struggling to discern what is real in a sea of slant, fake, & fact.”

This is partly why even flagrant rule & law-breaking & obvious lies & corruption do little to move public opinion.

One response is to walk away & tune everything out - it takes time & effort to comb through the bullshit, & most people have busy lives & limited bandwidth. Another reaction is to retreat into tribal allegiances & stick to the media that feeds you the info you most want to hear.

The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more & more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable, leading to a 'post-truth' reality.

The press & news media SHOULD sift fact from fiction & give the public the information it needs to make informed political choices. But if you saturate the media ecosystem with misinformation & overwhelm the media’s ability to mediate, then you can disrupt the democratic process.

What we’re facing is a new form of #propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age. And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable. It's mainly what the culture war is all about.

For most of recent history, the goal of propaganda was to reinforce a consistent narrative. But zone-flooding takes a different approach: it seeks to disorient audiences with an avalanche of competing stories.

It produces a certain nihilism in which people are so skeptical about the possibility of finding the truth that they give up the search.

60% of Americans say they encounter conflicting reports about the same event - so it’s not surprising trust in news media is declining.

Steve Bannon articulated the zone-flooding philosophy well, but he did not invent it. It was pioneered by Putin, who uses the media to engineer a fog of disinformation, producing just enough distrust to ensure that the public can never mobilize around a coherent narrative.

In the US, Bannon learned that flooding the zone with ridiculous (more often than not divisive culture war) stories does not necessarily persuade the public that something is true, but rather it creates a cloud of doubt around oppositional figures, narratives, actions & ideas.

Even if lies & misinformation are quickly debunked, the damage is done: right-wing media amplify the falsehoods; armies on social media - bot & real - will, too.

The mainstream press will be a step behind in debunking, & even the act of debunking will serve to amplify the lies.

George Lakoff calls this the “framing effect.” If you say “don’t think of an elephant,” you can’t help but think of an elephant. In other words, even if you reject an argument, merely repeating it cements the frame in people’s minds.

Repeated exposure to fact-checking does tend to increase the accuracy of beliefs. But the issue with 'flooding the zone with shit' is an overabundance of news, which diminishes the importance of any individual story, no matter how big or damning.

In this environment, there are too many things happening at once; it’s a constant game of whack-a-mole for journalists. False claims, if they’re repeated enough, become more plausible the more often they’re shared, something psychologists have called the “illusory truth” effect.

Our brains tend to associate repetition with truthfulness. Some interesting new research found that the more people encounter information, the more likely they are to feel justified in spreading it, whether it’s true or not.

A consequence of pervasive confusion about what’s happening is people feel more comfortable siding with their political tribe.

If everything’s up for grabs, & it’s hard to sift through competing narratives to find the truth, then there’s nothing left but culture war politics.

There’s “us” & “them": the possibility of persuasion is off the table. We're left with a febrile media environment of competing narratives - those with the most reach & resources are able to most effectively 'flood the zone', adding to the general atmosphere of doubt & confusion.

Think of zone-flooding less as a strategy deployed by a person or group & more as a consequence of the way media works. We don’t need a master puppeteer: the race for content & the need for clicks, is more than enough. Feeding nonsense into the system divides & confuses everyone.

A ridiculous culture war story, a dangerous COVID claim or an unhinged announcement by a Government Minister can dictate an entire news cycle at the drop of a hat.

The media cycle is easily commandeered by misinformation, innuendo, & outrageous content.

These are problems because of the norms that govern journalism & because the political economy of media makes it hard to ignore or dispel bullshit stories. This is a significant problem & unfortunately, a solution is nowhere in sight. Even more divisive channels are on their way.

The instinct of the mainstream press has always been to conquer lies by exposing them. But it’s just not that simple. There are too many claims to debunk & too many conflicting narratives: the decision to cover something is a decision to amplify it &, in some cases, normalize it.

Nearly all of the incentives driving media militate against rethinking (news) media. The diagnosis is easier than the cure. Liberal democracy can't function without a shared understanding of reality. As long as the zone is flooded with shit, shared understanding is impossible.

This thread is taken from this article, with some relatively minor adaptations made to focus on the contemporary UK context.

vox.com/policy-and-pol…

And it may well be linked to creeping neofascism.

https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1479513916292141056?s=20&t=iwDmLrzRoQ-OuhpaF6BzXw

In 2017, Boris Johnson met Steve Bannon in the US, Bannon met with Jacob Rees-Mogg in London & in 2018, Bannon met with Michael Gove, & then 'flooding the zone with (culture war) shit' escalated.

This was before GB "News". Murdoch's talkTV launches soon.

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1397273894898307077?s=20&t=osAOxeoVS5tsz0CKcEZ9KQ

Voting once every several years does not mean we live in a democracy.

No reasonable, rational person could look at political events over the last two years & conclude Britain still has a functioning democracy.

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1487032108405166080?s=20&t=5yDJdRnid5m99B7lfhPXDw

https://twitter.com/natsechobbyist/status/1486673408784011266?s=20&t=OYXGSvNnlhuXj72JEgxmHA

🧐
#NeverForget #NeverAgain

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1371265857108738048?s=20&t=z6LdsMDSzd_Clih85PXaWg

https://twitter.com/docrussjackson/status/1414551273609830402?s=20&t=BqMFg_GomVgwrs78xUox0w

Others call 'flooding the zone with shit', 'the Firehose of Falsehood', or simply #firehosing.

Here's a clear & accessible explainer: