Jonathan Rauch on Disinformation

He suggests that it is a verb, not a noun

Jonathan Rauch said,

Disinformation manipulates the information environment in order to deceive, disorient, divide, and demoralize. Now, please note this is not an evaluation of a particular statement. What we’re not saying here is that you look at a proposition and identify it as true or disinformation. This is a technique of propaganda. It’s a system, a method of manipulation.

I hear Rauch as arguing against framing the issue of misleading information in terms of what to do about particular content. That approach treats disinformation as a noun.

Instead, we should think of disinformation as engaging in tactics to mess with our minds, to manipulate us. It is more like a verb. Bad actors use lies, half-truths, and propaganda to gain power or achieve other goals. Such misbehavior is not unique to social media, although with low cost and weak guardrails, the apps do invite bad actors.

Consider what we are learning about how President Biden’s entourage hid his age-related impairment. I regard this as a prime example of disinformation activities that relied very little, if at all, on social media. I wonder whether Rauch shares my opinion.

Later, Rauch says,

If someone asked me what single thing would I do to heal the divisions in American society and make us less susceptible to the manipulations that we are now threatened with, it would be, fix Congress. What does that have to do with polarization and “propagandization”? Congress is the only national body, the only forum that can bring people of different parties, factions, regions, and interests, together to do bargaining and negotiations, to strike compromises, to have a stake in those compromises, to gather the information necessary to make those compromises. When Congress is broken, nothing else works, and it becomes that much easier for our domestic and foreign adversaries to play these games with our mind.

In this part of his talk, Rauch starts to lose me. He seems to believe that he can see clearly who is a bad actor and who is not. A Congressman who is aggressively partisan is a bad actor, and a moderate is not. Donald Trump is a bad actor, and the Washington Post is not.

In a complex social system, identifying Congress as the point of intervention strikes me as simplistic. Moreover, I reject Rauch’s good guy/bad guy framing.

Let us stipulate that Mr. Trump lies regularly and that the Post, while biased, usually stops short of pushing falsehoods. I think that we have to evaluate them relative to their social roles. Mr. Trump’s role in society is not to be the arbiter of truth. The Washington Post does aspire to such a role.

I trust neither of them. This year I wrote in Milei for President, and years ago we canceled our subscription to the Post. But relative to the roles that they play, I feel worse about the Post than I do about Mr. Trump. He can be untrustworthy and still turn out to be a decent President. The Post cannot be untrustworthy and be a decent newspaper.

Rauch says,

If people don’t understand how our system works, and they think that, you know, someone comes to Washington, waves a magic wand, and everything’s supposed to change. You know, we drain the swamp, or we have a messiah like president who says, hope and change, then, of course, they’re going to be very disappointed and angry.

I agree that lack of civic knowledge is a problem. Young people do not learn how government works, what the various branches are supposed to do and what constraints they face. Young people do not learn how to engage in fair debate, as opposed to dunking someone on social media.

But how do we fix that? The leverage point would seem to be our education system, but speaking of institutions where it would be naive to assume that someone can come and wave a magic wand…

Even if populism suffers from the ignorance of the masses, I do not think that is our worst problem. I think that our society suffers primarily because of the shortcomings of the elites. Their intellectual fads, conformity, and arrogance do much more damage than MAGA.

I get the strong sense that Rauch disagrees with me on that. It might make for an interesting debate.