So much of dictatorial power comes from just showing up. Everywhere.
Soon after my return from Vietnam, I was living in Boston and saw a notice of an upcoming Black Panther Party meeting. At the time I wasn’t sure just what they were doing, but I knew one of their primary objectives was protecting the black community from aggressive policing.
In the Army I had rubbed shoulders with enough African-Americans to understand what comes of being systematically oppressed. Although I was troubled by the shootings of police on the West Coast, the Panthers’ Boston chapter had not been accused of violence, and was ostensibly oriented toward helping blacks with food and education—it seemed like a positive move toward peaceful support of the black community.
I went to the meeting, curious to see what was up, and even considering helping them out. I also had a notion of showing that not all white people were clueless.
But I was greatly disappointed. It was a small gathering of young black men in a windowless room (lacking windows made sense, but it was depressing nonetheless). While I, as the only white person there, was understandably greeted with suspicion, they seemed more curious than hostile. It was a good start. But then I began asking questions, and before answering, whoever I was talking to would consult the Little Red Book (“The Sayings of Chairman Mao”) which everyone possessed. Where the book was not actually lying out in full view on a table or shelf, it would be in someone’s pocket—pants pocket, shirt pocket, out it came.
I have no specific recollections of what was said, but I do recall being shocked at the appearance of mindless devotion to the sayings of a ruthless megalomaniac. I left after about twenty minutes, wondering if the Black Panthers were brainwashing themselves. I was well aware of the failures of Communism, but to see up close how a cult of personality can get so bound up with political doctrine, even in the United States, was sobering.
I knew that Mao’s picture was plastered everywhere in China, as Stalin’s had been in Russia. That echoed George Orwell’s chilling novel 1984, where the image of Big Brother was ubiquitous. North Korean Communist leaders have adopted the same practice. But after visiting the Panthers, I suspected that many Communist Party members in China were also carrying around the sayings of Chairman Mao in their pockets.
Which brings us to 2019 and Donald Trump’s 60-million-strong Twitter following. It is famously smaller than Obama’s (north of 100 million), but the key stat is that 31% of Republican adults follow Trump’s Twitter feed, according to a report by the Pew Research Center published last July.
These stats go partway to explain why zealous Trump supporters have the appearance of a cult. A large proportion of the American population is carrying around Donald Trump’s sayings in their pocket, and they are refreshed daily. If they’re reading even half of what he’s saying on Twitter, they’re being fed a daily diet of lies, insults, personal attacks, and angry, obscenity-laden fulminations against anyone who opposes him. (To be fair, rants and attacks are only about half of his tweets, but out of a total of 20 a day, it’s still a lot. And many of the non-attacks are thanks and compliments handed out to supporters such as Fox News journalists who are purportedly countering the “Fake News” put forth by such hotbeds of radicalism as the New York Times. )
Trump has an advantage over Mao in that his tweets are dynamic, giving him the opportunity to tailor his messages to the topic of the day and keep switching targets. His chosen topics and targets have a sameness about them, reminding us of how people begin to believe anything if it is repeated often enough. Trump has no qualms about repeating himself endlessly, and knows it helps him with his base. “Witch hunt!”
What about Obama’s Twitter following? Since it’s so much larger than Trump’s, isn’t there a danger of an Obama cult?
There is—or a mild variation of one. It’s an inconvenient liberal political truth that many Obama followers on Twitter accept his tweets uncritically. A lot more folks love him than love Donald Trump (a relative Good Thing, but should we really love our political leaders?). However, Obama’s content is not divisive in the harsh and hyperbolic way that Trump’s is; and his tone is that of a calm, self-assured, rational being. Many of Trump’s tweets are meant to provoke unthinking, indiscriminate rage. It’s not just the number of followers, or even the number of tweets, it’s the intensity that matters.
Nevertheless, the Obama phenomenon illustrates the possibility of a master manipulator (more masterful than Trump) with aims quite different from Obama using Twitter to lead us by degrees down a dark and dangerous path. Think it couldn’t happen in America? Did you think six years ago that Donald Trump had a realistic shot of winning a national election?
Brevity is the soul of wit, not necessarily of wisdom
I follow a few people (not @realDonaldTrump) on Twitter whose views I respect and mostly agree with. It is one of the less satisfying activities I engage in—rivaled in dreariness only by flossing teeth— because of the predictability and shallowness of what is being said. Sometimes there is “news”—in the sense of being something you might not already know—but that news is reduced to a bite of text. Once you know the text bite, and the writer’s bias, you know what to expect—there is little value added. I often wonder, am I just too stupid to get it? Certainly some of the time. But usually I wonder, instead, why are so many people reading this stuff which is just about scoring points? Boiled down to essentials, it’s reminiscent of Monty Python’s “Argument Clinic” skit. (Link below provides an abbreviated form of the entire sketch, cutting out the arrival of the Entertainment Police. If you found it funny the first 50 times, you’ll still find it funny.)
Unhappily, intelligent and well-informed people concerned about the flood of misinformation pouring out of the truth-starved Right feel obliged to resist the flood using the only tools available . . . and Twitter has become the go-to tool. But it’s a poor tool for deepening a conversation. It’s immediate, quick, short, and while often clever and catchy, it skates over the surface. There’s just not enough space to do justice to a complex issue. It has a dumbing-down effect on everyone, left, right, and center . . . just the way Trump likes it.
Dave Barry’s characterization of Twitter is apropos: “Twitter, a medium that has the magical power to transform everything it touches, no matter how stupid it is, into something even stupider.” (This was in his year-end summary of 2019 in the Washington Post.) While Barry trades in satire and comic exaggeration, his assessment of Twitter is not that far off the mark.
Twitter’s worst threat: no filter
There’s nothing more obvious than that Twitter enables Donald Trump to connect directly with his followers. It’s also obvious that cell phones permit him to connect with his followers throughout the day, anywhere. It’s obvious that he stirs up his followers to a pitch of anger that strengthens the temptation to check his updates frequently in order to snap up yet another slice of red meat.
It’s also obvious that Twitter enables Trump to say just about anything he damn well pleases. Even the monitors at Twitter might draw the line if he called for the incarceration of all Democrats—but who knows? It could get out before they catch it. His rejoinder would be the same as in other cases he’s been caught in an utter outrage: “it was just a joke.” He’s already outed (or thinks he has) the Ukraine scandal whistleblower, which is against the law! He doesn’t care, because of the incomprehensible rule (not law) in the Justice Department that you cannot indict a sitting President. As to which, this bizarre form of immunity is no more than a convention foisted upon us by those of an authoritarian bent, the same kind of people who upheld the sovereignty of a king in the American colonies.
(Anyone who takes American democracy for granted needs to understand that many turning points in the Revolutionary War were decided by chance—likewise the Civil War. We may have entered a similarly perilous time.)
Trump is free to tell just about any lie that suits him, with impunity—and Twitter enables him to spit out lies rapid-fire. There’s little filtering of his message by fact-checking news media. Mark Zuckerberg has said that anyone is entitled to say anything on social media short of a direct threat of violence. Exposing the identity of the whistleblower was tantamount to a threat of violence, about as direct as you can get without actually saying, “Somebody shoot the bastard.” Anyone who thinks otherwise is of the same level of naivete as those who believe that Trump’s request of a “favor” from the Ukrainian president was anything other than a shakedown.
The success of Trump’s lies owes as much to Twitter as it does to the gullibility and willful blindness of a large proportion of the public. Without Twitter, Trump could never have been elected, and if elected would never have been able to stir up the chaos and confusion that are the hallmarks of his presidency.
What about the argument that anyone can harness Twitter to counter the Trumpian narrative? Twitter does not privilege political leaders. YOU could use a Twitter account to launch your own counternarrative.
Unfortunately, that argument has two big holes in it:
(1) It is already being tried, by a host of anti-Trumpers across the political spectrum. It’s having no impact on Trump True Believers. It’s hard to see that it’s having much impact on the public at large, either. The opponents are rational voices expounding into a howling tempest blown by Trump and his supporters (many of whom just re-tweet or parrot what he’s said, in case someone missed it the first 20 times).
(2) Most of those who push back at Trump and his minions are people with scruples, who try to stick to the truth—often this is the entire point of our message. This is fatally flawed when it comes to countering lies spewed by the unscrupulous, because there’s only one truth, and countless ways to lie. As Michel de Montaigne put it:
If falsehood, like the truth, had only one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.
As long as I’m quoting smart people, let’s hear C.H. Spurgeon with a slightly different take: “A lie will go round the world while the truth is putting its boots on.” Similarly Jonathan Swift: “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” (Note these guys would have been a hit on Twitter.)
If you don’t want to take de Montaigne’s, Spurgeon’s, and Swift’s words for it, you might want to take a look at an article in The Atlantic, summarizing an extensive study of Twitter by MIT. It concluded, per data scientist Soroush Vosoughi, “It seems pretty clear . . . that false information outperforms true information.”
Thanks, but . . . duh.
Kidding aside, the piece in the Atlantic is well worth reading through. If it scares the hell out of you, then it’s done its job. *
What’s the solution? Does it have to be big?
As you may have noticed if you read the Pew report, only 22% of U.S. adults say they use Twitter. That sounds good, if you’re afraid of what Twitter is doing. But the Pew report also noted that ripples from tweets spread outward among media in general, and Trump counts on it:
Many Americans are exposed to Trump’s tweets even if they don’t follow him on the platform, such as through retweets, quote tweets or in media coverage. Trump himself has noted as much: In a June TV interview, he said, “I put it out, and then it goes onto your platform. It goes onto ABC. It goes onto the networks. It goes onto all over cable. It’s an incredible way of communicating.”
The danger of Twitter is partly due to the nature of the medium itself, for reasons advanced above, and more. But the danger of the medium is compounded by the freedom granted to it by the ideology of free-market capitalism. Members of Congress—Republicans in particular—are put in a bind by the prospect of trying to regulate Twitter and other social media. They see the danger, but what most ties their hands is their allegiance to a form of capitalism that has few guardrails—the system we’re in now. Most of them are cheering Trump on for tearing down guardrails. To hobble social media runs contrary to their economic philosophy. The consequence is that Twitter and Facebook continue to take us on a ride into a fog of chaos and confusion.
This is happening not so much by intention as by the iron rule of the market: profit or go home. Jack Dorsey’s ban of political advertising on Twitter was a nice gesture, but if political advertising was more than a negligible component of Twitter’s revenue stream, he couldn’t have afforded it. He scored points for social consciousness, but the devastation inflicted on truth by Twitter roars on.
I am not going to go far into the immense topic of capitalism in this post, but suffice it to say that Marx was onto something when he said that capitalism had within itself the seeds of its own destruction. He could not have foreseen it would take 21st-Century digital social media to get them to germinate.
Citing Marx does not mean that I’m a fan of Soviet-style Communism and its totalitarian offshoots. Democracy and capitalism can co-exist, but as they exist now, the friction between them has put them on slow burn. The draw of Trump, and the popularity of Bernie Sanders, attest to the dilemma we’re in. There’s no solution without drastic restraints on free-market capitalism. By comparison with fundamentally changing the shape of the economy, fighting Trump is just a sideshow. Bernie Sanders has said as much.
The ride that the digital behemoths are taking us on won’t stop when Trump leaves office. Trump’s lies are a modestly-sized piece of flotsam in an ocean of online falsehoods. The ride may be headed toward an even greater domination by plutocrats than we see now—or worse, toward the surveillance state of the nascent China model. We might find a middle road, but we can’t do it fumbling through a fog.
Next up, Part III of Treading into Darkness: how Facebook and other social media warp our perception of reality.
UPDATE: The place of Part III was seized by the Senate vote on (not) allowing witnesses and evidence in the impeachment trial. So the Facebook discussion will be postponed until Part IV or if other shocking news comes out in Trump’s takeover of government, maybe even Part V.
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* From the article in The Atlantic:
Why does falsehood do so well? The MIT team settled on two hypotheses.
First, fake news seems to be more “novel” than real news. Falsehoods are often notably different from all the tweets that have appeared in a user’s timeline 60 days prior to their retweeting them, the team found.
Second, fake news evokes much more emotion than the average tweet. The researchers created a database of the words that Twitter users used to reply to the 126,000 contested tweets, then analyzed it with a state-of-the-art sentiment-analysis tool. Fake tweets tended to elicit words associated with surprise and disgust, while accurate tweets summoned words associated with sadness and trust, they found.