Thread by @crddouglas

Last year I wrote a piece about the religious aspect of fake news circulation during the 2016 election. The Cambridge Institute for Religion & International Studies asked me to expand it to include the 2017 European elections. /1 ciris.org.uk/2018/02/21/int…

So I wrote this report for their network of Western diplomats. My research uncovered three asymmetries in the way fake news circulated in the U.S. and Europe. /2
ciris.org.uk/2018/02/21/int…

First, fake news circulated more during the 2016 U.S. election than the 2017 European elections. Second, fake news circulates more among conservatives than liberals. /3

Third, fake news targeting conservatives often has a religious theme that fake news targeting liberals is missing. There are several reasons for these asymmetries – linguistic diversity, media consumption patterns, a lesson learned. /4

But an important factor is U.S. religious history: the Christian Right has cognitively trained conservative Christians to doubt & deny mainstream academic and journalistic expertise for more than a century. /5

More: they’ve built an infrastructure of counter-expertise to provide more theologically amenable explanations about evolution & Bible criticism. That infrastructure doesn’t exist to the same degree in other countries. /6

America’s epistemic crisis of what @drvox calls “tribal epistemology” among U.S. conservatives thus has – partly, significantly – a religious origin that we need to recognize. vox.com/policy-and-pol… /7

Thanks to @C_Stroop, @drvox, @mariabustillos, @MarechalUSC, @KevinMKruse, @Kasparov63 for their work and insight. And to @RDispatches, @UVicReligioNews, @HUReligion for chances to present & exchange ideas. /8
ciris.org.uk/2018/02/21/int…

Another part of this story is the way in which members of the Christian Right (and others) have effectively been targeted by extremely sophisticated psychological operations / information warfare. Everyone read this:
theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/…