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The Genesis of Misinformation
I just stumbled across an article by Peter Pomerantsev that explains the genesis of one of the weirder rumors about France I’ve seen reported as fact in the US media: The idea that one in six people in France support ISIS. The notion is so outlandish that I was astonished anyone could believe it, but I’ve seen this so-called statistic repeated over and over — albeit never by anyone in France. The article is about cyber-propaganda. As Pomerantsev puts it,
The internet has transformed propaganda. No longer do the state and media elites have a monopoly on public opinion — now anyone has the power to be their own Murdoch, Churchill, or Goebbels. This has empowered both crusading dissidents and the darkest sides of the ideological spectrum, posing new challenges for how democratic governments should respond and opening up new opportunities for states willing to mess with other countries’ information environment.
Many countries are. As he reports,
The internet has put governments, and authoritarian governments especially, on the back foot. But while they have had to surrender absolute communication control, many are learning how to use the internet to their own advantage. David Patrikarakos, author of Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State, looks at how the regime in Tehran has gone from describing social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter as “enemy spaces” to experimenting with using the internet to attack dissidents domestically and spread the Islamic Revolution abroad.
Russia has also been experimenting with manipulating the global information environment. One “cognitive hack” saw Kremlin propaganda skewing Google’s search function to the degree that if you typed “ISIS France” into it, the first recommendation was “ISIS France Support.” “This happened,” explains Patrikarakos, “not because of any genuinely high levels of support in France for ISIS, but because the most sophisticated algorithm in the world…was effectively hacked to produce this result.” A Kremlin propaganda network had wrongly reported that one in six French people supported ISIS. The story was picked up by the news website Vox in the US, and quickly spread further.
It spread so far that even though I’m in France myself, Americans on the Internet will insist to me that they know for a fact that I’m surrounded by ravening jihadis.
But I’m still not clear how this happened. I get it that Vox is a little credulous, but I can’t imagine they’d knowingly source a story to a Kremlin propaganda network. Does anyone happen to remember seeing that statistic, and if so, can you remember where you saw it? I’m curious enough now that I want to see if I can track down the way this ludicrous idea spread and became a “well-known fact” — about a country that’s easy to visit, full of journalists, and a top American tourist destination. So this statistic should have made anyone who looked at it say, “Pardon?”
Published in General
I’ve seen a marked drop in that claim in the past few years. It was easier to believe before the US became a major oil producer, I reckon.
(Sometimes I wonder if the hysteria about global warming originated in a CIA disinformation campaign designed to reduce global economic dependency on the Persian Gulf. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Yes, I know: conspiracy theory. I’m not asserting it as fact. At all. I’m just saying that this is an example of what I described here: When people don’t have enough information to form a rational theory about a weird phenomenon, they start to construct conspiracy theories. The “We’re going to bake to death” hysteria strikes me as so inexplicable that I find myself resorting to the construction of conspiracy theories to try to make sense of it. It’s somehow easier to believe that than to believe that so many people have persuaded themselves, on the basis of evidence that’s inconclusive at best, that this is an issue worthy of emergency summits, international treaties, and the full attention of the world’s heads or state. And the problem with my conspiracy theory is that I can’t posit a plausible mechanism by which this could have been done. I just note that after the ’73 oil price shock, and particularly after 9/11, the world’s dependence on Gulf oil must have seemed to policy planners a huge strategic liability — and one that could only be solved by creating a massive incentive to restructure modern economies. “You should drive less” wasn’t going to do it. Maybe “You’ll bake to death” sounded like a more plausible argument.)
Well, many of the things you suggest were tried in Greece. But tried in conjunction with raising taxes. People like Krugman and other economists on the left were warning that the sudden implementation of such a tight fiscal policy would stop growth in its tracks, make it less likely that Greece would be able to repay its debts, and have catastrophic social consequences. His predictions proved true — and the IMF’s predictions were disproved. So I think it would behoove me to say (at the least) that something was wrong with my mental model. It may not be a lesson that’s applicable in all cases, at all times, but it’s made me more humble about what I know and can predict.
It is an unusual case, though, because Greece didn’t have access to the tool of an independent monetary policy, and because its fiscal policies were in many ways decided on a political basis: It was politically impossible to sell any program that didn’t involve Greeks being punished for cooking the books, so the troika had a big cognitive blind spot — warnings that this might not only immiserate Greece but threaten Europe’s political unity were discounted, I suspect, because their remedy had to sound fair to the rest of Europe.
Yeah. Which is why I said cut taxes and cut spending, not cut one or the other. That, and the other contaminants you mentioned, meant that no serious reform was tried.
Tangentially: on the discounting, the EU’s leadership and I were somewhat aligned where EU’s unity is concerned. The EU’s unity might have been put at risk. I think, though, that that is an overblown risk, for two reasons. I’ve argued elsewhere on Ricochet that EU’s unity would not have been put at serious risk even with Greece’s default and departure from the Union.
But I also think a fracturing of the EU into several parts, itself, would be a risk only in the narrow sense of some possibility of that happening. The fracturing of the EU, in fact, would be a net good for the nations involved.
Eric Hines
I share your wariness of the mischievous way the term “austerity” is used to cover a lot of unlike things.
As for the fracturing of the EU, I’m more interested in the fracturing of the United States and a return to the principle of subsidiarity. Hence my interest in a return to crazy patchworks of state and local regulation.
Funny. The third or fourth or fifth or sixth time I’ve heard a similar claim recently: of course we don’t all want you dead; if that were true, you’d all be dead.
I know nothing of the demographics of France; but what does one mean by the term “support”? Your phrase, which I highlighted, implies support = murder.
Really?
The way it’s often reported — based on a poll no one ever took — is that when asked whether they have a “positive view” of ISIS, one in six people in France said “yes.” But since this poll was never conducted, the story about what it asked tends to vary a lot. It’s like a game of telephone — everyone cites someone else’s blog or newspaper article, and each time the story changes a little bit. But the original source does indeed seem to have been Russia Today, bless their diabolical hearts.
Regardless. Your phrase: If one in six supported ISIS, we’d all be dead. Which I have seen oft quoted in the last couple of days.
Does support = murder?
Yes. Unless you know so little about ISIS that saying “I support them” is meaningless. They’re absolutely clear: There’s no middle ground, and everyone must either join them or die. Joining them means joining the jihad, as they conceive it — which obviously means either becoming a murderer or an accessory to it. You can’t, according to them, be in “the grey zone.” So if someone were to say, “I support ISIS” but not act upon it, it would suggest they don’t know enough about ISIS to answer the question.
I don’t see any way you could support ISIS — unless you knew nothing about them and thought you were being asked about a pop star — without signing up for the jihad.
Clair,
I think you are seeing the results of removing a stop gap medicine not the sickness. The real problem is justice people are not treated equally under the law.Especially in eastern European countries justice can so easily be perverted by bribes. Money from the government can cool your resentment aka you can be bribed into excepting an almost class system were the connected, rich and special interest groups have a huge advantage under the law. When you remove the governmental bribes and tax people more yet you still have the twisted legal system were there is not the rule of law it causes destabilization. However in the long run when you bribe people and yet have an increasing bigger break down in the rule of law you are going to have unrest it is just a matter of time. So austerity is just causing the inevitable to happen a few years sooner.
I tend to do that. I find I want to know where my Progressive and liberal friends are coming from. I suspect I’m among the most conservative non-firestarting readers of jezebel.com.
Lately, I find my more reasonable liberal friends are not as reasonable as they were. Unless I’m getting less reasonable.
Claire Berlinski:
“If one in six supported ISIS, we’d all be dead.”
This still doesn’t seem right with me. (And I’m not claiming that one in six do – I have no idea.) It’s the notion that it can’t be true, otherwise we’d all be dead.
This is how I see support:
So I’m not buying your “If this then that” logic.