On the Internet and the future of Civil Political Discourse

In today’s blog, I am referring to a number of incident of false information, spread by the Internet, which have achieved wide dissemination and resulted in increased polarization and scapegoating of individuals and groups in our society. This blog is now about these incidents per se, but about the mechanism and effectiveness of this approach and its potential impact on our society. Although the examples show various partisan bents, this is not a partisan post; we are all targets of such disinformation no matter what we believe, and we will all suffer the consequences if civil political discourse is destroyed by these measures, and we will all enjoy the benefits of increased mutual respect and cooperative action if civil political discourse can be encouraged.

Alarm bell 1: “You Lie” outburst

The other night Representative Joe Wilson (Republican, South Carolina) interrupted President Obama’s address to congress and to the nation by shouting “You lie!”. This story is all over the press, and I won’t repeat it because this blog entry is not about that outburst per se,nor the next 3 alarms that follow, but it is inspired by it. While the question of the cost of a national health care program is a real concern, as well as measures for controlling those costs, many hoax letters have been circulating with misinformation about mandatory death panels, guaranteed coverage for illegal aliens, etc. have been circulating widely, with the intent to alarm people not inform them.

Alarm bell 2: Bozeman Montana Townhall letter

Also, a few weeks ago I received an email from a family member that included a forwarded email reporting and commenting on events that supposedly occurred in conjunction with Obama’s recent town meeting in Bozeman,Montana. The sender was outraged by what he read about the wasteful ways and stifling of free expression by the administration as reported in the letter. This letter had passed from friend to friend to friend, and each recipient tacked on their own personal feelings of outrage at the administration after reading it. You may have received a similar letter. Indeed, I think that everyone who reads this letter would agree that the actions of the administration reported in the letter are indeed wasteful, oppressive, and outrageous, and that citizen action is necessary to ensure they don’t continue. The problem is, the events that reported that were true factual news reporting of when and where the event was held, etc., but the alarming parts of the letter, the reported outrages described, didn’t happen. It was a hoax hoax email.

Alarm bell 3: Presidential IQs

These letters aren’t just authored by radical conservatives. Back in 2001 I received an email from an alarmed colleague containing a letter purportedly reporting on IQ tests conducted on the 12 previous presidents, whose spans jointly covered 50 years. The letter reported the Lowenstein Institute as ranking William Clinton the highest, followed by Jimmy Carter and JFK, while Eisenhower, Ford, Reagan, George HW Bush and George W Bush were reportedly all at the bottom. The letter also reported the average IIQ of the 6 Republicans as 115.5 for all Republicans, and 156 for the Democrats. This letter was circulated again in 2007 during the election, from yet another source. This email too was a hoax.

Alarm bell 4: Average citizen IQs by states

It isn’t just politicians who are being smeared to make civil political discourse amongst each other impossible. In 2004, a hoax email reached me that gave out false Average IQs by states. Not surprisingly all the states whose electoral votes were won by the original author’s favorite candidate were in the top half of the list, while those on that went the other way all appear in the lower half of the list.

The consequences of these hoaxes

This is just a small sample of the emails that have been circulated to me through several hands. These were all hoaxes. And they took in many very bright, and normally skeptical people. But the sense of outrage toward the targeted scapegoat groups that resulted from their initial consumption was very real and persists today — making it even easier to believe more outrageous false reports in the future.

Even smart people are taken in

The people who have sent me this letter, and other alarmist letters in the past are not unsophisticated, naive, or unquestioning citizens; they include bankers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and a former parter in charge of the international offices of one of the 4 accounting firms, and other people whose success is often dependent on retaining a fair amount of skepticism. And if these people can be manipulated in this way, we are all vulnerable to such manipulation.

The internet is not evil (but it can be used effectively for devise purposes)

Don’t get me wrong. I love the Internet. I have been working for 30 years to enable computers and networks to enable better communication among people in distant locations. Among the many products that I have helped to define and bring to market is the first commercially successful Web Conferencing product, today known as Microsoft Live Meeting. And I’m pleased to know that every day over a million people use it to meet with people at a distance, instead of having to hop on planes. I certainly don’t want to shut down that kind of communication.

Why we need civil political discourse

This entry is about the importance of civil political discourse, propaganda, the influence of the Internet and social networks on political discourse and my serious concern that our ability to have a civil political discourse is being undermined. This is a non-partisan concern, as it effects all of us. The importance of political discussion is that many of the benefits and protections we seek from government can only come from mutual action and consent. And mutual action and consent requires mutual respect for the needs and desires of all people who participate in the political discourse, not just those we agree with.

The alternative is temporary stalemate, followed by unilateral action and domination by force, and at its extremes genocide, tribal warfare, civil wars and other conflicts such as the Hutus vs. Tutsis in Rwanda, Catholics vs. Protestants in Northern Ireland, Serbs vs. Croats and Muslims in Bosnia, Sunni vs. Shiite in Iraq, and the Nazis vs. the Jews in Nazi Germany, and lest we forget it can and did happen here in the US between abolitionist and slave states.

These chain letters are not designed to mobilize us to SOLVE problems by finding solutions that will work for everyone — They are designed to make any solution impossible, to push our buttons, not only to foster hate and distrust, but to get us so upset we have to mobilize our friends and enroll them in the campaign of distrust as well. It uses the same kind of social engineering tar computer virus writers use to temp us into infecting our computers and toy spread that infection to our friends. The fabrications are artfully interwoven with well known (and boring, not alarming, facts). The latter give them credibility, the former enrage us, and stir our anger at a class of people that the author wishes to identify as the scapegoat that is causing all the evil in our country.

Which individual or class we are supposed to hate varies with the author and their goal, but we are all likely to be exposed to ever more of these letters, and if they succeed, we’ll all be hating everyone like in Tom Lehrer’s “National Brotherhood Week” parody:

All the white folk

Hate the black folk,

And the black folk

Hate the white folk,

All my folk,

Hate all of your folk

And everyone hates the Jews.

But during National Brotherhood week…

The danger is not in the lie, but in the repeating…

It isn’t the specifics of the lies that upset me so. I don’t feel the need to debunk them all point by point. No, the thing about these letters is the speed and reach with which they are spread. Those perpetrating these hoaxes have learned well the lessons taught by Joseph Goebbels, Reichsminister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”

The role of the Internet in rapid reproduction and dissemination of alarmist hoaxes

The internet, which brings us instantaneous friend to friend emails, social networks, and blogs is the greatest tool for rapidly repeating and disseminating lies as any wannabe propagandist could ever want. It is nearly effortless to get your message repeated over and over and over by well meaning people in just a short period of time. And because our social networks overlap so much, we receive the same message (that might seem dubious from one source of unknown credibility) from multiple sources, friends and family and colleagues we trust. Surely they can’t all be deceived — so we become even more convinced of the truth of these lies. But that’s the scary part about which Goebbels spoke of, When we hear it repeated everywhere, we all quickly forget what the original source was, and then we accept it as truth without question.

A Need for Increased Skepticism

We need to wake up. We need to become more skeptical. And we need to put into place automated mechanisms that alert us that these kinds of messages can be hoaxes, just as we have created automated methods to alert us to potential Phishing emails and Spam. If we do not increase our skepticism, and counter the quick spread of such hoaxes, we will surely turn large portions of our scapegoats and solve the problem of having too many of these scapegoats — but not eradicate the evil we claim they caused.

No one is safe, everyone is a target of disinformation

It doesn’t matter who the identified scapegoat is: Now it isn’t just the blacks, whites and Jews that Tom Lehrer parodied. Everyone of us now has a target drawn on our back by some internet propagandists intent on creating hatred and distrust for Democrats, Republicans, Conservatives, Liberals, Right to Lifers, Right to Choose supporters, evangelicals, gays, lesbians and transgenders, illegal aliens, rich white men, blacks, skinheads, politicians, union leaders, central bankers, the CIA, the liberal press, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and everyone else. Every one of these has been identified by some internet propagandist as the source of all the countries ills in these emails I have received, in blogs referenced by other blogs, and in web pages promoted through twitter and repeated in podcasts on YouTube and iTunes.

A lonely planet

No one group above is responsible which evil in our society, but the logic of these propagandists is that if we euthanize or deport all members of all of these groups we don’t like we will probably eradicate all our problems. Sadly if every one of them is successful, they will all be right, for there will beno one left to complain or care.

I am frightened to see how easily educated, well meaning and really caring folks are not only duped by these propagandist artists but actively enlisted in copying and disseminating these lies, and unconsciously supporting these campaigns to spread more hate and fear.

Remember “Never trust anyone over thirty”?

Folks, this has to stop. If it doesn’t, some of us will wind up victims of this hatred. We don’t have to go back to Nazi Germany to see what this kind of division does to a nation of people who hate and fear each other. We don’t need to look at Sunni and Shia violence in Iraq, we don’t even need to look all the way back to the Civil War. We have plenty of other examples closer to home, with millions of people who still remember what it was like. People who. saw what happened in the 60s, at Kent State, at the Democratic convention in Chicago, in Memphis and Missisippi, with the SLA, the KKK, the Weather Underground, Black Panthers, Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. It was a time when a common phrase in the youth culture was “never trust anyone over 30″. We know what happens when we can’t trust each other. It is not unthinkable that we will face that level of unrest again. Indeed, if we don’t start the hatred and scapegoating it may well be inevitable.

Break the cycle:

Look not for how your neighbor can deprive you, nor how you can deprive your neighbor, but how together you may both prosper.

If we are going to avoid revisiting such times of violence, we need to stop assisting the propagandists who foment fear and distrust and single out groups or individuals as the scapegoats we should blame. We must break with the idea that those who are not with us are against us. Instead we must ask ourselves what common needs and desires do we all have in common as Humans? How can we work together to find ways to increase the ability of all to secure their own needs and achieve their own desires together?

Look, we know the propagandists aren’t going to stop inventing all these alarmist stories, so we can’t expect these to stop at the source. Not if we want to continue to have freedom of speech. We have this same problem with Spam as well. But while we can’t eliminate Spam, we have created effective ways to limit its transmission and effects.

Let’s NOT just pass it on.

Since we can’t stop these hoaxes at their source, minimizing its impact means we have to find ways to stop the spread of propaganda at the earliest point in the distribution. It means we need to take the responsibility for spotting it, and not passing it on — no matter how artfully the authors weave the alarmist lies with the boring truths.

We have to learn to become skeptics and create automated mechanisms that assist us in identifying things we need to be skeptical of.

A FEW STEPS WE CAN ALL TAKE: AN EXAMPLE

Here’s how I try to verify or refute such letters.

First of all, anytime someone sends me a letter that has alarming information in it, which it blames on some political group, or prominent person, I try to check it out — even if it contains parts I already know to be true, or it blames groups or individuals that I currently dislike, fear or distrust. Maybe even ESPECIALLY if it seems perfectly targeted to appeal to my existing biases and beliefs and just make me more alarmed. Because that’s the one I am most vulnerable to. But if I get sucked in, I may burn bridges with the very people I need to enroll for mutual assistance and benefit.

Using snopes.com

If I identify the letter as having alarmist attributes, i immediately check to see if it has been verified or debunked. Most of these letters I see have already been reviewed by Snopes.com, the urban legend verification site.

Usually the way I check on such a letter is just to highlight a paragraph from it and search for that paragraph using Google. I almost always find some place where the veracity of the letter has been verified or refuted.

Using Google search

For instance, the Montana Town hall chain letter is covered in snopes.com at http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/montana.asp. It was easy to find. I just highlighted a paragraph in the copy I received, copied the selected passage, and pasted it into the search field for the Google search engine. The snopes.com reference was 7th in the hit list. It took me less than 3 second to find the snopes article, and see that it is “mixed truth”. A couple of minutes more and I had read it and find out what was true and what wasn’t. I chose not to pass it on, but instead to write this blog entry.

I hope you will join me, not in hating propagandists, but in refusing to help them spread hatred and civil unrest. I hope you will also join me in a movement for more civil political discourse, and respect for those who disagree with us.