The Propaganda Machine — Catlyn Keenan

Misinformation is getting more and more difficult to identify. Bots and propaganda farms are intentionally sowing discord using social media platforms. They target progressives and conservatives alike. The Pew Research Center reports that as many as two-thirds of links to popular websites are posted by bots. All of us must do our due diligence to resist their efforts.

Our posts, likes, and follows on social media give organizations very specific profiles on all of us. Those profiles are used to stoke our fears and anxieties in order to further polarize the world. The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America reports that exposure to views that challenge one’s perspective can increase radicalization. And none of us are safe.

Here’s one example of a post I fell for. This image appeared on my social media feed:

Meet Rob Cantrell [sic] who lives in Los Angeles. Rob is a white supremacist who is being paid to attend protests in blue states all over the country. This #Deplorable is the face of the Republican Party.

The tagline, from a May 3 tweet, reads, “Meet Rob Cantrell [sic] who lives in Los Angeles. Rob is a white supremacist who is being paid to attend protests in blue states all over the country. This #Deplorable is the face of the Republican Party.”

Before sharing, I jumped online and did a quick search for Rob Cantrall. Numerous reputable news outlets, including a local Michigan news affiliate, affirmed the image as being Mr. Cantrall. So I shared it.

It’s not Mr. Cantrall. The man’s name is Brian Cash and he lives in Michigan. The photo was snapped by AFP Agency’s Jeff Kowalsky. Mr. Cash claims that he is not screaming at the officers protecting the capitol building, but at a person behind them. The person who does not appear in the picture is a capitol guard who threw out protestors the day before. So, while Mr. Cash is protesting lockdown orders and not wearing a mask, both problematic in and of themselves, he is not Proud Boy racist Rob Cantrall.

This is Mr. Cantrall. I have not been able to verify where the mistake originated. It’s possible that the photo of the Michigan protest is simply a case of mistaken identity. Both men are white with grey in the front of brown beards. But Mr. Cash is balding and heavier than Mr. Cantrall. It seems as though a quick comparison with Mr. Cantrall’s prolific social media presence would quickly indicate that the two are different people.

However the mistake occurred, here is what interests me: reliable news media picked up the story and ran it as true. They did correct their mistake, but we live in a world where social media moves faster than reliable reporting can keep up.

Here’s the other thing: the Proud Boys are sending members into protests. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center: “Even though the Proud Boys weren’t behind efforts to get the protests (of COVID-19 lockdown measures) off the ground, they quickly realized their value. They are the perfect platform for the proto-fascist group to make the case that the will of a small minority of Americans – the hyper-individualistic “patriots” who attend these rallies – should supersede democratic processes, and that individual desires should trump the collective public good. The protests also provide other benefits: the chance to launch their ideas into wider right-wing circles, further cement their status as core members of the Trump coalition, build relationships with local politicians and gain attention from outlets like Fox News.”

Protest movements are ripe for the spread of misinformation and propaganda. The more chaotic, the better to incite anxiety and build upon social tensions.

As protest movements and riots occur in numerous major American cities, the flood of disinformation becomes almost impossible to keep up with. Here is one perplexing example I came across on Facebook on May 30.

A user by the name Tina Martin claims that this image shows protestors “protecting an officer that was separated from his team, outnumbered and in danger.” I went hunting for the source of the photo. It appears to have been posted on the subReddit r\HumansBeingBros. I could not find any other source for it, nor could I locate any news outlet reporting on a story of protestors protecting lone police officers. I did use Google Maps to verify that Bearno’s is a pizza joint in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. However, the picture has been pulled from Reddit (see below).

A day later, on May 31, a reverse image search shows the photo linked to an article in The Grio, a news and entertainment site with an African American audience. The photo is credited to “Social Media/Nancy Duncan.” The article confirms the story on Facebook: the image is of protesters protecting a police officer.

So is the photo what it claims to be ? Or is it an image of protestors linking arms in solidarity while a police officer looks on? There’s a news camera clearly visible in the second photo. The photo began on social media and then got picked up the next day by a news organization. So now it’s legitimate, right? Or is it another case of Cash/Cantrall confusion?

This is exactly the sort of post that sets my spidey senses atingle. It seems benign, like it’s showing good people being good. But it is part of a narrative that delineates “peaceful protestors” from “rioting thugs.” It perpetuates the binary and simplified perspective that rioters do not have any good reason

to riot: they’re criminals, not communities that have been systematically targeted by racist policies, often at the hands of the justice system. (Some rioters are inciting violence. Some of them are “accelerationists” with links to white supremacist and militia movements.)

Another one that has me thinking is this post from Facebook purporting to contrast “‘Armed Rednecks’ Defend Stores from Looters amid George Floyd Protests” by the New York Post with the “real” story that it’s both black and white men defending this Kentucky tobacco store. The video these screen grabs are from can be found in the Post article.

In the video, the reporter, who works for the Minnesota Reformer, an independent news outlet, approaches two white men and has a conversation lasting a couple of minutes. Other people move in the background of the video, including one black man carrying a rifle. There is no indication of the men “unifying” though the white men do say that they have joined other people protecting the store seen in the background.

There is a much more nuanced Vice article by Tess Owen, “Far-Right Extremists are Hoping to Turn the George Floyd Protests into a New Civil War,” that has the same video of the “armed rednecks”. Owen does not come out and say that these men are members of a militia but she implies it by including the video right above the line, “Local activists identified another group in Minneapolis as members of the III% militia, one of the largest militia networks in the U.S.” The line actually refers to the image below the text – the video appears above – but it’s irresponsible editing because it can easily be read as the men in the video are members of a militia. The men in the image, as of this writing, are unidentified. They say that they support justice for Floyd and are in favor of protests, going on to express disapproval of looting specifically.

Good propaganda works by allowing people to stay in their comfort zones and maintain the status quo. Good propaganda wants to avoid people asking tough questions about that status quo. And a lot of propaganda is produced by bots. Bruce Schneier writes in The Atlantic, “Artificial personas are the future of propaganda. And while they may not be effective in tilting debate to one side or another, they easily drown out debate entirely. We don’t know the effect of that noise on democracy, only that it’ll be pernicious, and that it’s inevitable.”

Effective propaganda works by twisting parts of the truth up with implicit and explicit falsehoods. The goal is to disorient the audience. Being confused and uncertain is mentally exhausting and so most people revert to their fallback positions in defense. This constant reversion strengthens the original position. Perhaps counterintuitively, propaganda works best when it does not affect change but keeps people in their safe little grooves. White moderates support the status quo, even if they think they don’t. They vote for Biden, not Bernie. When given a choice between Clinton and Trump, they vote Trump. A lot of modern American propaganda (much of which does not originate in the United Sates) is designed to make both the extreme right and the extreme left sound so foreign and scary that people stay home from activist activities, keep their money for capitalist consumerism instead of political causes, and vote for the people who uphold their sense of wellbeing. In other words, they maintain the status quo that, in this country, bankrupts people with medical bills, murders black and brown people at much higher rates than white people, keeps people impoverished, and refuses to take climate change seriously (to list just a few of the more egregious social ills).

The very first thing that we all need to do immediately is STOP POSTING THINGS THAT EVOKE A REACTION. The “share” button will be the death of us all. As difficult as this is, we need to wait. Wait to see what journalists say. Let the facts be confirmed and reconfirmed. Then share.

I cannot end this post without a brief note regarding journalism. I recently heard an excellent interview with author Rutger Bregman in which he differentiates between “news” and “journalism,” saying, “Maybe we have to make a distinction here between the news and journalism. So I think that good journalism helps you to zoom out, to focus on the structural forces that govern our lives. And I think that good journalism is also not only about the problems, but also about the solutions, and the people who are working on these solutions.”

People rant about “the media” all the time and sometimes with good reason. The 24-hour news cycle trying to stay ahead of social media is what results in people being misidentified and posts created by propaganda bots being shared as true. Good journalism does its work: it digs in, fact checks, and is much less likely to get it wrong. For the love of all things holy: STOP SHARING.

If we, and I’m including people across the political spectrum here, start recognizing propaganda for what it is then we see behind the curtain. The goal of propaganda is to keep truth ambiguous, to question all facts, to make reasonable voices sound insane. Effective propaganda conflates Info Wars with The Atlantic and tries to convince us that both are equally valid sources of information. We must learn to recognize propaganda for what it is. The very future of our world is at stake. That is not hyperbole: like Rome, America can fall. Parts of it should fall. But we need to work together to ensure that change is not cataclysmic.