A firestorm of misinformation

Meta’s decision to stop factchecking its platforms was announced in the same week as LA continues to be devastated by wildfires. The two events are long in the making and related.

Wearing a $900,000 watch, Mark Zuckerberg recently declared that Meta’s social media platforms would cease factchecking. Not only that but they would also allow changes to the Hateful Content policy to allow the calling of LGBTQIA+ people mentally ill and to call women property. This was, according to Zuckerberg, a better reflection of culture.

The watch is not irrelevant. The oligarchs have become much more brazen in displaying both their wealth and their determination to impose their societal goals on the rest of us.

Meanwhile disinformation is circulating about the wildfires destroying parts of LA. The fact that the region is experiencing extreme drought in a time of year where there is usually moisture has meant that much of the territory is effectively kindling and, furthermore, that there is a water shortage to fight the fires. High winds not only spread the fires quickly but make the use of aircraft to fight them dangerous. These conditions are related to climate change. Instead the social media platforms – and news – are filled with people complaining that DEI is to blame. (“Diversity Equity and Inclusion programs provide the new rightwing code for the N word.)

Social media platforms are the primary way a sizeable proportion of the public gains its news, and the filling of these spaces with false information is dangerous in the long and short term. Lives are literally at stake.

The tech bro oligarchs have been working to both control and pander to Donald Trump, largely for the pay-offs and regulatory benefits. Zuckerberg, for example, accompanied this announcement with a million dollar donation to Trump’s inauguration fund.

A 2021 Wall Street Journal investigation found that Facebook executives – including Zuckerberg – knew the company’s platforms augment violence. Those platforms have been accused of being complicit in the genocide in Myanmar, a then growing risk of one in Ethiopia, and lynchings in India. Despite that, Facebook didn’t make the radical changes required.

It seems less extreme to accuse Facebook (and YouTube) of being powerful forces in creating communities of conspiracy theorists in the Covid era. Their radicalising algorithms drive people towards embracing destructive identities based on a proudly anti-expert conservative model. It is in these spaces that anti Covid vaccine sentiment spread most wildly.

The social media companies showed how rapidly they could act when they chose to shut down ISIS’s ability to recruit on their platforms. On other matters, however, they have chosen barely to intervene. The decisions underline a trend in the tech bro world towards a distinctly ugly range of ideologies.

A tech trend towards fascism is combined with its libertarian strands – both interconnected with eugenics. Thielism is toxic. Their version of longtermism is trending towards the wildly dangerous. Investigative journalist Jenny Cohn is tracking tech oligarch interconnection with Christofascist trends. Not only that but Trump’s interest in Greenland has been sourced to tech oligarchs mineral needs, but also their desire to start a futuristic networked state there.

The tech oligarchs are echoing Putin’s process in Russia where the public abandons a sense that truth is obtainable, becoming deeply cynical. We are lost in the firehose of falsehoods that has overtaken our information space. This builds on the natural cynicism resulting from a political system utterly distorted away from being representative and paralysed by political and donor machinations.

While the tech oligarchs have magnified the problem, the collapse of trust in the West has been decades in the making and not accidental.

The making of idiocracy

The Mont Pelerin Society made a conscious effort to begin breaking the Keynesian consensus that governments had a role in the shaping of society by embedding themselves in universities in free-market beachhead institutes. The wealthy fell over themselves to fund these projects. The Chicago School was the first. The phenomenon has been wildly successful in changing the consensus and the legal framework to the oligarchs’ desired neoliberalism.

They used faux thinktanks as adjuncts to promote their messaging in a chorus of voices to produce a sense that there was widespread policy sector support, alongside the academic, for the oligarchs’ goals. These bodies were networked from 1981 in the Atlas Network. That body aimed to foster and interlink the global metastasising of junktanks to provide the conditions everywhere that would suit American corporations, with benefits for local donors.

The main goal was to promote free market truthiness as consensus. Accompanying it was a commitment to disingenuous strategies to forge a voter bloc that would support the primary goal.

The movement reflected its Cold War era origins. Deeply hysterical about communism as a threat to property, business and Christianity, the operations were set to fight everything they identified as a threat.

At the same time, Christian-identity Republicans established the Council for National Policy (CNP) as a way to promote a more theocratic America, as well as a free-market one.

These strategists imagined a loyal voter bloc forged from the poor. They desired a tribal identity that would see Whiteness as well as being “conservative” as allying them to the wealthy Whites who were stripping away their standard of living. Meanwhile those voters were distracted by grievance.

In the late 1970s, a conference call between a collection of Republican figures including Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich, the man behind the Heritage Foundation, took place. (Heritage is a key player in both Atlas and the CNP.) They debated topics around which a Christian Right identity could be galvanised. Prayer in schools was one of the topics abandoned. Abortion, drawing on Phyllis Schlafly’s powerful anti women’s lib movement, was the issue selected in the end. The Evangelical sects would be galvanised into the heart of the new Moral Majority.

The success of this long game is astounding. We see even women who want to be pregnant dying in Republican states with doctors too scared to treat them in an emergency. The relevant states are now working to prevent bodies that monitor reproductive health outcomes being able to survey and report on the uptick in deaths.

The integration of Evangelical Christianity into the MAGA movement is key to the distortions of empirical knowledge. The Evangelical churches of America tend towards rejecting the secular world and consensus reality. That religious phenomenon has also absorbed the conspiracy theories of QAnon.

“Conservative” attacks on “expertise” simultaneously readied many to embrace this farrago of nonsense.

After Paul Weyrich and associates forged the Moral Majority as a Republican voting force primarily motivated by the opposition to abortion access, the next main thrust in the creation of an anti-intellectual conservative identity came from the push to delay climate action.

The first season of the Drilled Podcast tells the following tale in an engaging manner, with plentiful primary sources as evidence. In the 1970s, Exxon planned to produce a new Bell Lab (which had been responsible for so many revolutionary communication inventions). Exxon had a number of scientific departments working on new energy strategies to replace fossil fuels. Its scientists had made clear that the risk of a climate crisis was real. The only questions were “how bad” and “how soon.”

Shell’s projections about the carbon threat had been even more concerning.

Conservative politicians such as Maggie Thatcher and George HW Bush later spoke about climate change as a problem that must be addressed.

When oil prices crashed in the early ’80s and a new corporate leadership took charge, however, the science was abandoned. The fossil fuel lobby elected to borrow the tobacco sector playbook to launch a PR effort to muddy the debate instead of making the transition to new business models.

Funders such as the oil-rich Koch brothers poured billions over years into Atlas think tanks which would amplify the disinformation.

A third form of Atlas junktank was established: the “grass roots” organisations (astroturf) working largely to feign public support for the policy and academic think tank “experts” creating doubt about climate science.

The conservative identity would no longer be allowed to accept that fossil fuels posed a threat. In the ’90s, figures like Peabody Oil’s Fred Palmer were key to the campaign to promote a new anti-science, anti-expert conservative identity.

Fossil fuels were made to seem integral to the American dream and CO2 central to a greener, more prolific planet. Any “so-called expert” that tried to explain the science was anti-American.

These groups surrounded politicians but also produced information for schools and universities. They filled the newspapers with advertorials and shifted high status mastheads like The New York Times’s editorial stance towards the fossil fuel position. The “libertarian” think tanks — funded by fossil fuel millions — have had considerable input into the shaping of academic and intellectual debate channeling public discourse.

It was no longer possible for conservatives to accept that climate science was a science, nor an important problem confronting humanity.

Palmer, a Catholic, was also central to the campaign to make the use of fossil fuels a new part of the conservative Evangelical identity. He still claims today that fossil fuels were placed in the earth as part of a divine plan. Nor has he rejected his 1997 proclamation that burning gasoline in cars was “doing the work of the Lord”.

Discrediting climate science was key, and central figures in the disinformation campaign remain close to government. Steve Milloy, linked to tobacco and fossil fuel companies, was part of Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team.

These bodies’ research cited “older less educated men” as a key demographic for anti climate science campaigns. They were considered easily mobilised by conspiracy theories and ready to scoff at experts. Campaigns were orchestrated to encourage them to take pride in their opposition to intellectuals.

“Working the referees” is one way to distort factual reporting. The accusations of bias against mastheads aiming to reflect facts as accurately as possible is one such exercise. The delegitimisation of the idea of factchecking in itself as a “liberal plot” or “censorship” is another part of the process of crippling the public’s ability to see truth.

Complaining that the mainstream media is an antagonist towards conservatism is another such strategy.

Atlas partner, Ronald Reagan’s ending of the Fairness Doctrine, which had mandated “fair and balanced” coverage of issues, in the ’80s led to a flourishing of shock jocks on radio. Rush Limbaugh was the most famous. He worked actively with the fossil fuel lobby in the creation of this conservative identity. He fostered loathing of “misguided commie libs,” and their “out of touch with reality” ideas.

These strategies and talking points became central to the new “conservative” Fox News, unleashed by the end of the Fairness Doctrine too. Rupert Murdoch is also interlinked with Atlas and is described here as a propaganda partner with the White House in its Cold War and political distortion machinations.

The media forces were able to build on the deliberate creation of a conservative sphere of disinformation begun in the early 1970s by Richard Viguerie (Council for National Policy) who used direct mail to scare grandmothers out of their pittance in the face of imaginary threats looming at the hands of the Democrats. Ultimately social media multiplied this effect exponentially.

Now this “conservative identity” with its disdain for experts and science and the mainstream media, all linked to the loathed “woke”, has become something radically disruptive. Using the tools designed by then immature social media entrepreneurs, these “do your own research” figures are radicalising each other into festering chaos.

Throughout the Covid lockdowns, frightened and anxious figures looked for knowledge from people like them on the internet. YouTube and Facebook allowed them to “research” all the ways that a “global elite” was harming them and their children. QAnon went from a joke on an “image board” to something able to swing American elections by the end of 2020.

And leaders of the “conservative” political parties fed into the folly. Trump pandered to the QAnon voter. This is hardly surprising. Some commentators fear he is becoming a god to a burgeoning religion.

More than 90 per cent of Fox employees were vaccinated even as their talking heads inculcated mistrust of science, experts and the Biden government in their viewers, leading to those viewers dying. Sky News, Australia’s Fox, has been part of the News Corp campaign to discredit virus mitigation. For Westerners now relatively unused to the natural and political crises that have marked life for most of human history, it can be hard to understand the impositions something like a pandemic or a climate disaster might inflict upon our existence.

The increasingly radicalised “conservative” parties of the anglosphere depend on the votes of people equally radicalised, and scared, against the consensus reality. The complaints against factual reporting and factchecking come from a political movement dedicated to falsity, since its inherent goals are deeply unpopular.

Conservative strategists encouraged the formation of an identity that would be tribal in allegiance, rejecting the knowledge and advice of experts. These machinations pose a critical threat to our lives during pandemics, to our democratic nations and potentially to the survival of our civilisation.

Arguably, the most dangerous aspects of this “conservative” identity are its opposition to scientific method and expertise. Zuckerberg’s decision to combine unleashing disinformation with unleashing hate speech against vulnerable groups illustrate that the bigotry allied to the constructed “conservative” identity will harm many along the way.

Parts of this essay were originally published as two essays Australia has proved fertile ground for US anti-intellectual propaganda and How the conservatives grew to reject experts and science in Pearls and Irritations in October 2021.

Also by Lucy Hamilton: Do Victorians dare trust Moira Deeming? Read her own words against abortion.

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