Alternate Realities
Manipulating information to make Americans angry about stuff that isn't real
“You can convince people to vote away their democracy if you can create a false world for them to believe in.” - American Historian Heather Cox Richardson
NEW YORK— As a journalist and co-founder of New Rules Media, I write about culture, media and the future of work, and for the past year, I’ve been watching, with grim fascination, the media industry, politicians and new voices online spar rancorously over what is real—so as to work out some kind of shared understanding, or shared reality, about what is happening in the world today.
But what’s happening in America is now something darker than a misinformation crisis we’ve all been navigating since the last time Donald Trump was elected to the White House. The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans, during the past decade of Trumpism, have dissociated from reality—believing, for example, that Joe Biden actually did steal the election from Trump in 2020 (false), that the January 6th attack on the Capitol was really a predominantly peaceful event (false), and that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were created by the federal government and directed by Joe Biden to ravage MAGA supporters in red state Florida and North Carolina (false). There are dozens of other recent examples of constructed, alternate realities being put forth by the Trump team to change the dominant social narratives of what’s right and wrong about America—whether about immigration, education, government and the like. [The recent false assertion by Trump that Haitian immigrants were eating the pet dogs and cats of Springfield, Ohio residents, went viral.]
“To watch reality get so entirely overwhelmed by crank theories and lies says there is now a durable ecosystem of disinformation that exists to shepherd citizens purposefully into an alternate reality,” says Atlantic writer Charlie Warzel. “It also says that people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.”
The New Media Ecosystem
Now that Donald Trump has begun naming his new cabinet, there is growing trepidation, if not an expectation among many presidential historians and political scholars expressed in interviews this week, that we’re entering a new kind of media ecosystem—one that is being used to create false narratives in order to control public debate.
The last weeks of the presidential campaign seem to justify—and contextualize— these concerns. Trump and his then-vice presidential running mate, conservative JD Vance, repeatedly cited the booming American economy as being “a complete failure”; the fallen crime rate to be “soaring to its highest levels ever” and that legal and undocumented immigrants comprise “an invasion of rapists and criminals.” Perhaps most chillingly, Trump has been equally brazen about policy, saying he would begin the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants immediately, “be a dictator on Day One,” weaken NATO and “stop the war in Ukraine in one day” in way that would make him “a hero to Ukranians” and to Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has been leading the democratic country’s resistance against Russian forces since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. The war has been ongoing since 2022 and has taken the lives of more than 31,000 Ukranian soldiers and an estimated 180,000 Russians.
Also drawing some concern is a new Trump team messaging strategy and tactic called "ambient seeding."It involves “seeding” the ambience of a person’s digital, information-rich environment with facts and false facts, targeting feeds which typically get minimal attention, like when we’re scrolling through social networks or streaming information into our eyes and ears—and then struggling later to recall exactly where we picked up this or that data point which informs some of the conceptions and beliefs we now hold.
Given today’s high-speed information environment, says media researcher Pablo Boczkowski, “people today increasingly take in news by incidental encounter. They are rubbed by the news—rather than by seeking it out.”
So how did so many false perceptions Trump was sharing during the campaign [and which would have been disprovable with 10 seconds of Googling] become fixed in the voting public’s mind, and why did some of these false beliefs prevail? Journalist Nathan Heller, writing in The New Yorker, says “…Donald Trump has maximized his influence over networks which people rub against, and said things meant to resonate with specific affinity or identity subgroups that were less about delivering policy information and more about tuning voters’ ears, like satellites, to the national signal he and his campaign directors were sending on themes including election fraud and a dismal economy. In this way, he was filling their online experiences with information which, true or not, seemed like all of a coherent piece.” This is the opposite of the messaging strategy the Harris-Walz team used and which micro-targeted communities with detailed facts, policy papers and in-person canvasing to drum up support. “…The goal of ambient seeding,” media researcher Boczkowski says, “is for people to meet ideas coming and going so often, virtually, that those notions after a time seem like common sense.”
The Challenge
What concerns many media scholars about ambient seeding, this new form of subliminal messaging, is that it also can be deployed successfully as a new form of propaganda, intended to persuade people who get most of their news online to either change their minds or persuade them to do something they wouldn’t do otherwise—or, worst case, says disinformation expert Anne Applebaum, “pervert democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders and the policies they had been manipulated into backing.” Both Applebaum and fascism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat say the Trump pattern so far signals that Trump may be seeking, ultimately, to move America closer to becoming a more autocratic form of government.
“Around the globe now, the autocrats are rewriting the rules of world trade and governance as their propagandists pound home the same messages about the weakness of democracy,” Applebaum writes in her recent book, Autocracy, Inc. “…But we need people willing to organize online and coordinate campaigns to identify and debunk dehumanizing propaganda so it doesn’t happen here. The autocracies in the world want to create a global system that benefits thieves, criminals and dictators, but we can stop them if we can resist them by exposing the truth of their actions.”
Will the Fourth Estate, and leading news organizations, be able to fairly cover the changes anticipated by so many about what the new Trump presidency will mean at home and abroad? Or will the news media be silenced by Trump, who has repeatedly railed against “fake news” and has said he plans to reign in journalists that don’t cover him fairly, in his view. And will social media influencers keep adding new and valuable perspectives and insights from around the world or be persuaded by propagandists at home and abroad to help distribute a new party line?
The challenge now, says American author and journalist Rebecca Traister, is to look at why and how recently we've become so polarized as a nation and “consider whether the fantasy of some unified American middle is perhaps at odds with the ongoing fight for truly representational politics.”
“The centuries-old battle to perfect our union means we were built to be split over policies and ideas,” she said. “The question now is whether America’s democratic systems and institutions can bear up in our new era of mega-identity politics, social media platforms and the weight of our 21st century divides.”
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be exploring the new cultural and media challenges and opportunities ahead and interviewing a diverse array of new local, national and global leaders about what’s next.
Stay tuned.
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