Conservatives Think Everyone Consumes And Spreads Misinformation
Nope. Wrong again.
Today's newsletter was written by Freddy, a Bad Faith Times contributor. If you're interested in writing for BFT, email me at dennyc13@gmail.com.
Life is hard enough without having to constantly be aware of the fresh horrors spreading across social media platforms. Yet that's what we find ourselves doing today: Wondering what those who consume far-right misinformation believe today, and what they might believe tomorrow, and how this affects the discourse.
I’m not talking about the legitimately awful things going on every day in the nation that we’re forced to consume through our media of choice. No. I’m talking about the things specifically designed to alter our way of thinking or intentionally mislead us in hopes of furthering a cause, talking point, or agenda. The bad faith things.
You know it when you see it.
Last summer, we watched Republicans parrot the unfounded rumor and proven lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets long after the woman who started that rumor admitted her mistake in posting it in the first place.
“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” said Erika Lee, who probably thought she was poking innocent fun on Facebook at a marginalized group that needed one more challenge to overcome. It was a stupid post; the damage was done.
Lee’s decision to come clean didn’t matter to JD Vance, who continued to mention it on every TV appearance he made, because truth doesn’t matter to his base, which resides in a carefully-constructed unreality. Perpetuating the lies about Hatian immigrants only stoked the fires of a base seething for an administration to enact the most inhumane policies since America's Japanese internment camps of the 1940s.
Lee's admission also didn’t matter to Donald Trump, who, during his lone presidential debate against Kamala Harris, famously exclaimed, “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats,” in what felt like an all-time bait for the ages. Again, Trump, who has never been accused of caring about truth, remained focused on the purpose that lie served, and did his part to stoke the fire.
And who could forget the story about litter boxes in the bathrooms of public schools for children who supposedly identified as cats? A story that served no purpose outside of being a way to further attack LGBTQ+ students. It was the kind of rumor that was so stupid that anybody who had two brain cells to rub together could easily dismiss it for the absurdity it was. Of course, right-wing influencers and those who consume their poisonous content either took this claim at face value, or pretended it was real for clicks and views and outrage. For millions of Americans, the litter-boxes-in-bathrooms story became real, even though it wasn't.
The faith is bad, folks, and social media is where it flourishes. It’s no secret to Bad Faith Times readers, but those on the right are also aware of it – at least to some degree.
During an unexpected text exchange with a conservative friend of mine, I was told that pro-democracy Americans taking to the streets in protest of the awful things going on – namely, the president's secret police snatching people off the streets – are little more than people "reading stuff on Facebook and running with it.” My response, which included but was not limited to stories about the regime's self-admission of mistakenly deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Supreme Court's ruling that the same administration cannot just deport people without giving them the chance to “actually seek habeaus relief,” and that people protesting genocide were being coined as “antisemites” and arrested for exercising their right to free speech were surprisingly met with an openness to further discuss the matter rather than hostility. I hope to have that conversation one day. It felt like progress.
A few months later, another friend, also a conservative (I grew up with a lot of conservatives), also blamed Facebook for misinformation that’s stoking the fury of those opposed to the regime's anti-constitutionalist policies. It was made during a non-political discussion, and I opted not to dive deeper into his remarks, but I found it interesting that two friends, in the span of a few months, who I never believed to be particularly interested in politics, blamed social media misinformation as the reason the “misguided left” does crazy things like protest for human rights and checks and balances on government.
While I have no doubt bad-faith actors exist across the political spectrum, I’m tuned in enough to know liberals tend to use a lot of real-life stories and cases, both on the local and federal level, to remain informed of the atrocities taking place within our country. Since January 6, 2021, the day I realized I needed to become more politically invested, I’ve never had my liberal friends send me Facebook memes or posts from obviously fake, rage-baiting news sources. Maybe it’s the perk of being on the side that still believes in quality journalism and journalists who actually care about democracy, the truth, the constitution, things of that nature. I don’t know.
Denny Carter
I cut myself off from Facebook sometime in 2021, when I realized it no longer served a purpose in my life and that I could, in fact, still exist in society even without a Facebook profile to prove my existence. My curiosity, however, was piqued by my friends, who are clearly aware of the misinformation being peddled over there, and thus I dove into the facts – another enemy of the right.
Research has shown unequivocally that the right is more willing to share online posts they know to be untrue because their desire for in-group dominance is far stronger than those on the left. If it helps them win, they'll do it. Nothing else matters.
I take no pleasure in reporting that I value Google AI as a research tool. Even if the answers aren’t always correct, I can count on it to provide links to articles from trusted sites. When I asked the Google machine, “Does misinformation on Facebook tend to lean more right or left?” this simple answer was returned by the AI:
“Misinformation on Facebook tends to lean more right-leaning, according to various studies. While left-leaning users are also susceptible to misinformation, right-leaning users are more likely to share it. This is partly due to the fact that far-right misinformation sources on Facebook tend to generate more engagement, which algorithms then amplify.”
It was the answer I expected, but one that I wanted to confirm. I also wanted to learn more about some of these “various studies." In a 2023 article published by the recently federally defunded NPR, authors Huo Jingnan and Shannon Bond wrote, while recapping a study on the misinformation divide on Facebook that “conservatives engaged more with political news, meaning they clicked, liked, commented on, and re-shared political news they saw more often than liberals did.” What’s concerning is that they point out that “conservatives are also the main consumers of websites that Facebook flagged as untrustworthy and links that third-party fact checkers flagged as inaccurate.”
I took this as a peek behind the curtain to understand why the group that buys into the lie that “the fake news media” is out to get them also feels like the world is against them when fact-checking the news, twisted forms of media they’re using as replacements.
Denny Carter
Another article published by the Harvard Kennedy School in 2021 titled Right and Left: Partisanship Predicts (asymmetric) Vulnerability to Misinformation, noted that previous research had shown that “the proliferation of conspiratorial narratives about COVID-19, and voter fraud, in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election” is consistent with those who most identify as conservatives. "While we find that liberal partisans are also vulnerable to misinformation, this is not a symmetric relationship: Consistent with previous studies, we also find that the association between partisanship and misinformation is stronger among conservative users.”
This checks out.
A 2021 study by researchers at New York University found that far-right misinformation sources outperform non-misinformation sources on Facebook, averaging 426 interactions per 1,000 followers per week, compared to 259 interactions per 1,000 followers per week for non-misinformation sources. Far-right news was found to suffer next to no “misinformation penalty” compared to sources from the center, left, or far-left, which creates unbalanced engagement between the sources. Social media companies are aware of this. Ensuring this misinformation spreads is their business model. And business is booming.
The studies delve far deeper than what I can cover here, but be sure to check out the provided links. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of far-left misinformation exists that would be akin to Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. I’m logged on enough that I feel like I would have seen this misinformation my friends claim exists, yet curiously, I can’t recall anything that stands out in the same way or would have had near the same impact either politically or socially as pet-eating Haitians, which riled up a base and dominated political discourse weeks ahead of the 2024 election. A few Facebook-using liberal friends of mine couldn’t recall a comparable story being spun by the left, but I’m willing to concede they exist.
Folks opposed to fascism are not taking to the streets to protest because of a Facebook memes they saw, however. My two conservative friends, who I believe are largely unaware of the bad faith that exists on the right, would likely have their minds blown over any real piece of news about what is going on, the lengths to which the constitution has been ignored by the first American dictator.
How would they feel about Trump’s bottomless crypto scam that is surely selling out the presidency in a way we have never seen? Would they be happy to know that a man convicted by Venezuela officials of a brutal triple homicide in Spain was moving to their neighborhood in exchange for an illegal immigrant whose worst crime was seeking a better life for his family?
Would they be in favor of a mother and her six-year-old son being held in an ICE detention center for weeks because of a paperwork error, or would they think that’s something worth protesting?
How would they feel knowing every Republican but Senator Josh Hawley, a known insurrectionist and one of the Senate's preeminent bad-faith actors, recently voted against banning insider trading among Congress, the vice president, and the president? Conservatives hate insider trading, but only when it’s Nancy Pelosi. I’ve heard it myself many a time.
We could sit around naming the true stories of inhumane offenses being shared daily by journalists, lawyers, and politicians who simply give a damn and, importantly, operate in reality. And if you’re like me, you likely know a conservative or two who is well meaning, and would be shaken by a reality that often seems too hard to believe – even moreso if you helped create it.
Are we going to change how these people vote? I have no idea. But as I continue to learn more about what they may be consuming (or not consuming) relative to what you and I, the fine folks of the Bad Faith Times community, see on a daily basis, I believe we have a responsibility to be more intentional about challenging the notion that social media is what’s driving people to protest in hopes of saving our country. To accuse folks of protesting because of an absurd Facebook post they read is, at best, uninformed and, at worst, an intentional dismissal of what’s happening.
We know what we’re consuming. We know what we’re seeing. And we know truth isn’t found in a meme or some sensationalized post from Liberals Are The Best And Republicans Suck dot com. I’m constantly wondering what I can do to help those I love break out of the right-wing unreality, in the hopes that they come away a little more informed than they were. Maybe you do the same. With a better understanding of the imbalance that exists on various platforms, which has collectively broken our brains to some degree, I hope we can speak up with the facts and stories that should move anybody who still has their soul intact.
Follow Freddy on Bluesky at @bftfreddy.bsky.social.
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