My understanding is that during the Cold War, CIA and KGB went through great effort to make disinformation propaganda look credible, planting plausible stories in seemingly credible media sources, and backing the story with manufactured credible-seeming evidence. Russian intelligence is exploiting a weakness in how human minds process information.
Illusory Truth, Lies, and Political Propaganda:
Posted Jan 23, 2020
According to a
Vox interview by Sean Illing with Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born journalist and author of
This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, a noticeable shift in the Soviet propaganda strategy emerged in
post-Soviet Russia that focused not so much on presenting falsehoods per se as breeding disbelief in facts for its own sake:
Which brings us, of course, to the striking similarity of Russia’s propaganda machine to the exploitation of the illusory truth effect in US
politics today. As Illing points out:
Pomerantsev describes how he has witnessed Russian propaganda strategies spread across the globe over the past decade:
Whether or not the authors are aware of it, this passage perfectly illustrates the illusory truth effect. President Trump tends to employ short phrases of uncertain attribution (“A lot of people are saying…”) that contradict facts, repeating them
ad infinitum (e.g. “Stable genius!” “Rigged!” “No collusion, no obstruction!” “
Fake news!” “Witchhunt!” "Read the transcripts!") until even those who identify with the opposing political party who know statements are lies might come to believe them on some level. Although President Trump has been
ridiculed for speaking at a fourth-grade reading level and relying on Twitter to communicate not only to the American public but foreign entities, it may be that his vocabulary, syntax, and preferred communication medium are intentional if not taken directly from a page in the Russian propaganda playbook.
With former Trump campaign manager
Steve Bannon calling for the “destruction of the administrative state,” eroding the very concept of truth seems to be part of a larger effort designed to tear down the authority of previously respected institutions or, as journalist Jesse Singal put it, to “undermine order itself.”
Although the erosion of truth and the rejection of expertise is often a core component of populist movements, Arendt and scholars of her work have highlighted that
the path from populism to authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and fascism can be short, direct, and downhill (see
here and
here for accounts of how this has happened in recent history around the world). Whether that goal is Bannon’s, Trump’s, or Putin’s and how they are connected remains unclear. What is clear is the threat that goal poses to “
truth, justice, and the American way.”
Researchers at RAND are pessimistic about “traditional counterpropaganda efforts,” noting that we shouldn’t “expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth.”9 Indeed, recent evidence suggests that there are several barriers to countering misinformation. One is that successfully correcting misinformation may require more cognitive ability than many voters have, regardless of political affiliation.11 Another is that the illusory truth effect seems to include not only faulty perceptions of truth, but also a diminished sense that repeating disinformation is unethical12 such that we risk becoming inured to the pervasiveness of lying, with liars in turn
no longer bothering to deny that they’ve lied.
The internet also represents a major obstacle to countering the illusory truth effect. While the internet’s unprecedented democratization of knowledge has fueled populist movements across the world, the hope that truth would “rise to the top” has not been realized. On the contrary, research has shown that online disinformation spreads “farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly” than the truth.13 Together with the illusory truth effect, the internet has allowed authoritarian political movements to spread rampant disinformation and erode trust in not only the “fake news” media but the concept of truth altogether by delegitimizing objective reality.
Still, recent research provides us with some pointers on how we might stem the noxious impact of disinformation. In one recent experiment, encouraging young people to act like “fact checkers” mitigated the illusory truth effect.14 Similar studies have shown that “inoculation strategies” warning people about likely exposure to misinformation and beating misinformation to the punch, can reduce susceptibility to being taken in by disinformation.15 Based on such findings, RAND researchers suggest that forewarning people about how propagandists exploit the illusory truth effect to manipulate audiences is likely to be more effective than specific refutations.9 And so…
The illusory truth effect is real.
It is commonly exploited as a tool of political propaganda.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/...ry-truth-lies-and-political-propaganda-part-2
