Thread by @jenmercieca

One thing that I realized the other day is that pre-bunking only works with your side, because of frame warfare. Let me explain:

During the 2020 election there were tons of pre-bunking/pre-emptive framing attempts to explain how the electoral count was likely to occur: ballots would take time to count in certain places, mail in ballots longer than election day votes, etc.

The goal was to help people understand and predict the process so that they would be more likely to accept the result. Folks knew that the extra time to count the vote would cause concern and would allow Trump, et al to claim victory/claim the vote was rigged.

Folks used smart framing terms like "red mirage" to pre-emptively frame reality with a unique and evocative term that would shape understanding. This pre-bunking was useful and needed because Trump was/had always claimed that if he lost, then the election was rigged.

His people were primed to believe that the election would be stolen and were looking for & producing evidence to support that claim. So, pre-bunking was meant to counter Trump's framing. I even tried to pre-bunk Trump's 2020 election rigging lies:

What Trump was up to, I said at the time, was "poisoning the well"--pre-emptively framing reality to shape the way his followers would understand what would happen. He predicted they would rig the election & if he lost that would prove they DID rig the election.

So of course you now see the obvious: one side's "pre-bunking" is the other side's "poisoning the well." Because our political discourse is frame warfare, your pre-bunk can work, but likely only with your side.

Every day our political discourse is dominated by an agenda-setting war (what issues we should talk about) and a frame war (how we should frame/understand those issues).

Again, so much of our political discourse is about controlling our political discourse. 🙄

That does NOT mean that we shouldn't pre-bunk or change the fact that pre-bunking is more effective than debunking. It just means limited effects at achieving a consensus truth because of frame wars.

Both sides will frame what they're doing as "defending democracy," which makes it seem like everything is at risk (& with elections everything is, of course). What a mess. The "politics is war and the enemy cheats" uber-frame/Biggest Lie is in the background for all of this.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't pre-emptively frame, just points to the difficulty of using that strategy with the opposition. We absolutely should pre-emptively frame. If you've ever wondered why nothing seems to get through to the other side, it's because of frame warfare.

We are all complicit in the information wars. Either knowingly or unknowingly, we are all information warriors. 😩