I was already thinking about writing a post on this topic of information bubbles long before the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Seeing the commentary of a few connections on social media as well as reports of what pundits and pastors have said convinced me that I need to write about this.
Watching Different Debates (or rather, watching the same debate differently)
Those who saw the debate between Donald Trump who were not already connected with American politics will surely agree that Donald Trump performed poorly, since even many Trump supporters say likewise. Yet if you ask Trump supporters how it went you will get one of two answers: he won, or he did poorly because of some unfairness natural or supernatural. Yes, you read that right. More on that in a moment.
What did Trump supporters do while watching the debate? First, they were inclined to trust Trump and so having merely the concept of a plan did not disappoint them despite being laughable to everyone else. He saw news about pets being eaten and then so did they and so clearly they cannot all be wrong.
Then they tuned in to Fox News, and went to church. On Fox News they heard Greg Gutfeld says that the one who was offering lie after lie was Harris, and that the moderators were clearly biased since they fact checked Trump but not Harris. To be clear, Trump was not the only one who said things that were not true, nor were all of Trump’s claims false or entirely false. While the way he put it was sensationalized and rather amusing, Harris did indeed indicate that prisoners with medical reasons should be able to get gender-related care. That is to be expected. The only way to lie effectively is to have some truth intermingled with false claims. And to be clear, false claims abounded. Racist claims that Haitian immigrants are eating pets? False, and irrelevant, since when have presidents ever been responsible for or able to control what people eat? Taking away guns? Sadly false. Transgender surgery at school? False. The United States as a failed country and Democrats as Marxists? False and false. While sometimes the truth is more complex than either candidate conveys, and sometimes both are telling the truth at least for the most part, it is very easy to show that Donald Trump keeps cycling through the same falsehoods over and over again, shuffling them in new ways that should not make them seem more plausible to anyone. As one person on Twitter quipped, it sounds like he is playing Cards Against Humanity.
So Trump was clearly the bigger liar and the less coherent debater. Yet his fans will claim he won. How is that possible? It is actually quite simple, and that brings us to the heart of this post. After the debate and perhaps during, Trump supporters tuned in to Fox News to be told the only true authoritative perspective on what they were seeing. They also livestreamed their churches. Such sources told them a variety of lies. The debate was unfair. The moderators, by directly addressing Trumps much more egregious lies, were biased. Witchcraft was being used that somehow was able to cause Trump to stumble despite supposedly being the Lord’s Anointed. None of that makes sense, but people are willingly embracing it because they have given their soul to the Republican Party and have identified their allegiance to Trump as inseparable from their allegiance to God.
This is why people can watch the same debate and come away with opposite impressions. If you have chosen to trust charlatans and keep going back to them to inform you, you will obviously have a badly skewed perspective.
These are also largely those who are privileged and who bristle both at any talk about privilege and yet at the same time hurt when privilege is removed. As Berny Belvedere put it on Twitter, “Trumpists are collectively flipping out about the moderators because, to them, even the mildest forms of factual accountability feel deeply unjust. They have come to expect special treatment for Trump, and in fact depend on it to help obscure how catastrophically unhinged he is.”
Ultimately the core of it all is egotism. Not only Trump’s, but also that of his followers. There are countless people who think they are Christians and want to be victorious warriors in a battle against evil. They are thus easily duped by those who tell them that if they just vote in a certain way, they will save trafficking victims in pizza parlors and beloved pets in Springfield.
Worse than 1984
So why did I title this post “Worse than Orwellian”? Unlike in 1984, the information bubbles in which people and communities find themselves are not imposed upon them by an authoritarian state. They may be reinforced by the way Google search algorithms work, but those algorithms feed user preferences. That is why you tell people with a different ideology “just Google it” and they are not only unmoved but find propaganda that supports their view. Google and other search results are not the same for everyone. They are shaped by your past search history.
In 1984 there is authoritarian intervention to rewrite history and bring about collective forgetting of the past. Today it happens even when the evidence of the past is not suppressed, hidden or destroyed. Scott Coley illustrated this when he posted a quote from a leading Evangelical of the 1960s-1970s without attribution, and today’s Evangelicals responded in ways that show they don’t know the history of how the stance of their churches has reversed over the past half century when it comes to abortion.
On this topic my favorite article is Fred Clark’s classic with a superb title, “The ‘biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy Meal.” Here is how it begins:
In 1979, McDonald’s introduced the Happy Meal.
Sometime after that, it was decided that the Bible teaches that human life begins at conception.
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Ask any American evangelical, today, what the Bible says about abortion and they will insist that this is what it says. (Many don’t actually believe this, but they know it is the only answer that won’t get them in trouble.) They’ll be a little fuzzy on where, exactly, the Bible says this, but they’ll insist that it does.
That’s new. If you had asked American evangelicals that same question the year I was born you would not have gotten the same answer.
In Orwell’s novel there is hope that the totalitarian regime might be brought down and history remembered aright. Indeed, the book’s conclusion in the form of an appendix told from the perspective of a later time informs us that this does indeed happen, that Big Brother proves to be a blip in human history. It is possible to envisage finding a way for a minority holding power through force and deceit to be brought down. What about when there is no totalitarian power doing it, no deep state or whatever other conspiracy theory one might subscribe to? When we are the ones ultimately responsible for selecting a diet of misinformation that leads us to more and more of the same, and when the habits of consumption that have taught Google and YouTube what to feed us with, is there any way for someone to helpfully break in, or to find our way out?
Bursting Bubbles of Misinformation
This is not ultimately a new problem. The Bible warns about false teachers, hypocrisy, legalism, and other things. It is possible to read those scriptures and for them to not have the effect on us that they are supposed to, because we assume they are about someone else.
The solution is not new either. The despicable opponents of dealing with our society’s gun violence problem are prone to say that it isn’t a gun problem but a heart problem. An effective solution does need to address the latter, but cannot neglect the former. So too here. There’s a need to develop technological means as well as effective messaging strategies to reach and alert people who are living in an information bubble of their own making. But ultimately so long as there are people who choose fearmongering and hate-promoting content, there will likely always be some who train the internet algorithms to reinforce that. As has happened countless times before, there are people who will be sitting in churches on Sunday and will believe that they are part of a group that promotes the truth, and not realize that their pastors have been discipled less by Jesus or by those who follow him, but by Fox News, Newsmax, and other such sources. Some across the aisle are just as quick to mock and promote hate towards their opponents, responding to and condemning the hatefulness of the right in a way that simply fosters a different sort of hate. Followers of Jesus and frankly of most historic religious and spiritual teachings will know that, as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, hate cannot be defeated by hate. Only love can do that. If you cannot bring yourself to love those who have allowed themselves to be misled through their own actions and choices, please try for pragmatic reasons. If you confirm their projected stereotypes by seeming hateful and dogmatic and (according to their sources) wrong, you’ll just exacerbate the problem or at the very least won’t help. Only love and kindness have any chance of making inroads and bursting through those information bubbles. Your opponents are human beings like you. You would not want to be written off if you had fallen into the trap of misinformation. Do to others what you would want done to you.
Ultimately, the important thing is not to give up hope. There is some hope that those who were motivated to support Trump because of so-called “pro life” reasons no longer have that justification. The fact that the people who have worked most closely with Donald Trump refuse to endorse him says a lot. Sometimes a tipping point is reached where people notice how many other people they would normally respect are moving in the opposite direction, and find the motivation and to do likewise. Or to put it another way, it is exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero.
On a lighter note (and for further reading)
For those who are feeling disheartened by all this, let me end with a link to something that gave me a laugh after the debate. I hope it will have the same effect on you. Whether it does or not will most likely depend on the information bubble you inhabit. Let me know either way. It came to me originally from among these memes about the debate.
Also related:
Paul Levinson and Diana Butler Bass shared thoughts about the debate.
Video about verifying information and why some perform poorly when asked to do it:
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