Democracy and Its Discontents, Ep. 1: The Attack on Truth

Introduction

Democracy is built on trust – and accountability.

Citizens need information to hold those in power to account.

But disinformation is eroding our trust in institutions, in experts, and even in each other.

[Simone Chambers: “It’s not only impossible to have a working democracy when you don’t have information, it’s also impossible to have a working democracy when you have groups that are just at each other’s throats, right?”]

I’m Lindsay Shingler. This is a special miniseries from Talking Policy we’re calling: “Democracy and Its Discontents.”

Over the course of five conversations, we’ll explore some of the underlying dynamics that seem to be driving polarization, and opening the door for aspiring autocrats.

In this first episode, we’ll talk with Simone Chambers, a professor of political science at UC Irvine and author of the new book Contemporary Democratic Theory.

We’ll explore what we know about the influence of disinformation, and how it’s impacting voter trust – both in elections and in the institution of democracy itself.

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Lindsay: I want to start the interview by going back to 2016, which is when voters in the UK voted to leave the European Union, and American voters in the U. S. elected Donald Trump. And both of these events were political earthquakes that reverberated throughout the United States and all over the world.

And it was around this time that a lot of people started thinking about things like fake news, and Russian bots, Cambridge Analytica, and more broadly about how social media could impact democracy and elections for the worse, not for the better.

So 2016 seems like a major turning point in our politics. Take us back: what happened in 2016? And is this sort of– is this the point at which, you know, there’s a before 2016, and after?

Simone: Yeah, I do think that. So, one of the interesting things is that 2016 came to be known as the post-truth year. That was the year – at the end of 2016 – that the Oxford Dictionary named “post-truth” and “post-truth politics” as the word of the year.

Every major university in the United States now has a center or an institute or some wing studying misinformation. If you look at surveys, most Americans and actually most, you know, citizens in democracies are very worried about questions of information and truth.

It’s also something that the press, media of all sorts, have picked up because it is such a kind of flashpoint, because everybody is worried about it. And they’re worried about it for two reasons.

I mean, information is just an absolutely essential component of democracy. First of all, people’s votes are based on their assessment of the facts. That is, what is government doing? How is it doing it? What are the problems in the world?

And if you have false ideas about both what the government is doing – what’s their output? you know, how are they behaving? –  also, a false assessment of what’s actually happening in the world, then of course your voting patterns are going to be problematic.

But I think even more worrisome is the way in which citizens are very aware of misinformation, and so it leads them to all sorts of types of distrust. So, distrust in – where am I going to get my information from? – a distrust in elites and government sources. But I think probably the most problematic is a distrust in each other.

So you might think, ‘Oh, I know my information. I’m getting good information, but I hear all these other people are, like, completely living in some kind of an echo chamber or believing outrageous things,’ and so you start mistrusting your fellow citizen.

And that undermines democracy. Because democracy is about, look, we all get to vote and we all get to have a say. But if you think, ‘Well, I’m letting people who have really crazy views based on completely false information have a say that’s going to affect me,’ that really is not such a great idea.

So if people think that there is a lot of information pollution, or a lot of false information circulating in a democracy, it undermines their faith in democracy in general.

Lindsay: So take us back to 2016. What happened? Walk us through that story.

Simone: Looking back on what made 2016 the post-truth politics era, I think there are really three things.

So, the first is, of course, fake news. And fake news at the time was like doubly misinformation. So the content was false or misinformation, but it was also presented as news. So it was often presented in what looked like legitimate news outlets. So they would call themselves the Washington Express or the Baltimore Gazette or something like that.

And so it made people think that these were legitimate news outlets that had editorial boards that had gatekeeping and so on. But they were full of sometimes quite ridiculous information. Things like “the Pope endorses Trump,” I remember seeing that and like going, ‘Whoa!’

But some of them weren’t as outrageous as that. And they were very widely circulated. So, we see now looking back, some of the data shows that like over 130 million American citizens were in some contact with some form of fake news. So there was a lot of that.

And then the second – that you mentioned also – was Cambridge Analytica. And the information about Cambridge Analytica didn’t really come out till 2018, that is the scandal associated with it.

But people already in 2016 were realizing that something was happening. And what this was, was taking people’s personal information in order to micro-target certain types of political messages. So really kind of to tailor messages to people’s identities – to what they like to read, to what they like to buy, to who they hang out with, and those kinds of things.

And the scandal was that Facebook had allowed some researchers to use personal information – supposedly for, you know, real legitimate kinds of research – but these people had sold it to political operatives. Particularly to the United States, to Steve Bannon, who was working for the Trump campaign, and then in Brexit for the leave campaign.

And they used that information in some really very problematic ways, particularly in the United States, you know, they used it to target African American voters to try to basically suppress voter engagement with different kinds of messages. So that– using that kind of information for micro-targeting political messages was the second thing that was very worrisome.

And then the third thing, which actually for me in some ways is the most important, is that there was a new type of politics – and some people call it populist politics, but it’s got different names – in which there appeared to be a kind of different way of presenting the truth.

So everyone’s always said, ‘politicians, you know, they’re always lying. They’re never telling the truth.’ But there was a kind of new blatantness about it.

And this was really captured in the American context very clearly when Kellyanne Conway was asked about Trump’s claims – evidently false claims – about how many people had attended the inauguration, and she said, “Well, there are alternative facts.” You know, “We got our facts. You got your facts.” And she said it without any kind of like being embarrassed at all.

So these expressions, in the public, unashamedly, kind of questioning facts and questioning the role of truth were really also quite a surprise and a new version of politics in 2016.

Lindsay: In a paper that you wrote recently, you distinguish disinformation from a lot of other things, like extremism, racism, general nastiness on Twitter.

And it was really helpful for me to read that to understand that there are a lot of different things going on in the ecosystem. And when we talk about disinformation that doesn’t cover absolutely everything. Disinformation is something distinct. Can you define it for us? What is disinformation? What does that mean?

Simone: Well, that is actually the hundred dollar question.

So, first of all, on the information side, there’s a distinction between misinformation and disinformation. Very generally, misinformation is just poor information or false information, but without claiming necessarily that anybody has actually intended to circulate it. Disinformation is a word that’s usually tied to people intending, right, to misinform.

And then there’s a third category, which I think is even more important, and it’s called malinformation. That’s akin to the word, like “malware.” So this is information that’s put in people’s, say, social media feeds that might not be false, but it’s intended to sow discord, to exacerbate polarization, and so on.

So we know– we have very good evidence, for example, that both Russia and Iran try to uprank and push stories about dissent, particularly racial dissent, in the United States to try to exacerbate and stress various cleavages. So this is information that is intended to weaken democracy, even though it might not be misinformation.

Lindsay: So we’ve talked about what happened in 2016 as this kind of watershed moment for disinformation, and waking up to the threat of disinformation. Four years later, in 2020, Joe Biden was elected. And then in 2021, there was an insurrection, by people who genuinely believed that the election was stolen. And this was a message that was communicated to them.

How did we get from 2016 to 2021? What happened in that intervening time that was productive and what didn’t happen that needed to?

Simone: So one of the really interesting things is that the disinformation and misinformation in 2016 and 2020 are quite different.

So in 2016, it was kind of a Facebook apocalypse, because most of the bad stuff was on Facebook, and Facebook really didn’t even know what was happening, and it was kind of algorithms that were amplifying it.

The data from 2020, for example, shows that the biggest source of misinformation prior to the 2020 election was Fox News. Now, of course, some of this information is spread like through Facebook, but Fox News is– is a news platform.

And the second was Donald Trump himself, who had, you know, millions of gazillions of followers on Twitter. So of course, Twitter was the amplifier, but it was followers of him, including – I have to add – many, many news organizations. Like, you know, CNN, and some news organizations that were following him.

So this is a different MO, if you will, for disinformation. And it really shows that social media, it is a mediator of it, but it doesn’t produce it. And it wasn’t the algorithms. This was a political problem that was decided by political operatives, to really undermine – even before the outcome – to undermine the electoral process.

So there was a lot of bad information circling about mail-in ballots, there was accusations that Democrats were dumping ballots, were stuffing ballots, were– all this stuff…And it turns out that the United States generally has a really pretty – I mean, there’s always shenanigans in every democratic election – but the American elections are pretty clean, all things considered, and there really was no evidence of this.

So the good news – sort of – is that it’s not these impersonal algorithms that are doing it. It’s political operatives who are exploiting the possibility of getting information out very fast. And Facebook has become way better at identifying fake sites and also way better at identifying external foreign intervention.

But the bad news is we have a political movement in the United States that really appears to be willing to violate norms, even like pretty basic norms of truth, in order to gain power, maintain power, and overthrow an election.

And this is a level of radicalization that sort of goes beyond just polarization.

Lindsay: You know, what you’re saying about Fox News and Trump himself being the primary purveyors of this disinformation, brings up your core argument, which is that: the the most serious threat to democracy isn’t social media, it’s not digital technology, it’s people who explicitly and knowingly seem to undermine democratic functions. So, I mean, how does this hurt democracy? What does it do to us as citizens?

Simone: In democracies, citizens are kind of– they’re supposed to rule. They elect representatives and they diselect representatives. So they need to make minimally competent judgments.

And there’s a lot of evidence that citizens generally aren’t really that well-informed, but it’s different, like, not knowing the name of your representative or not knowing the name of the Supreme Court justices versus actually basing your judgment on some false information.

And governments– in order for governments to be accountable to the people, we have to have good information about what they’re saying, what they’re doing, who’s paying them, and what’s going on. So if you don’t know what’s going on, you can’t have a democracy.

Lindsay: Yeah, and so, if citizens are misinformed, they might support bad policies, right? Like, if they’re misinformed about COVID-19, they might support policies that aren’t supportive of public health. Like, is that kind of what you mean?

Simone: Yes, but there’s two kinds. So the first is that they might support policies that are based– you know, things like public health. And the same is true, for example, for climate change. If they really don’t believe that the climate is being affected by human activity, they’re not going to support those kinds of policies.

But there’s a second way. And that is information about one’s fellow citizens.

So the United States is highly, highly polarized. And part of that polarization is run – or based on – stories about the other side, what they’re doing, how they’re behaving, how horrible they are. And sometimes, those stories also go along, you know, the party cleavage – Democrats against Republicans – but they sometimes also go along other kinds of cleavages.

So cleavages between immigrants and non-immigrants, cleavages on cultural and religious grounds, right? So, there was a lot of misinformation about Muslim and immigrants after 9-11, but that was, you know, prior to the way in which that type of misinformation can be made viral in our new technological ecosystem.

They also do that in Europe, particularly by broadcasting, like, crazy stories about what immigrants do, claiming a whole bunch of criminalization on the part of immigrants, which are not true. This is also– you can see that in some American debates.

And so misinformation about other groups leads to division, polarization, and it’s not only impossible to have a working democracy when you don’t have information, it’s also impossible to have a working democracy when you have groups that are just at each other’s throats, right?

Lindsay: We know that digital technology isn’t confined just to the U. S., that this is a global ecosystem. And for example in Hungary, Prime Minister Orban, Viktor Orban has spent public funds on disinformation about his opponents. How do we think about this as a global phenomenon?

Simone: On the global scale, it’s pretty clear that the United States is in a worse situation than pretty much any other democracy.

So I followed the German 2021 election pretty closely and the French presidential election in 2022. And both of them had some misinformation and some of it was like, some of it was outrageous and it was, you know, in the news, but it appeared to have no effect whatsoever on those elections.

And– and so the difference between, if you look at German and France and American elections, it’s the political climate. It’s not the technology. Everybody’s on, you know, everybody uses as much technology, Twitter, whatever.

So I’m worried about the way politicians are manipulating information, which is maybe to some extent facilitated by the speed and reach of technology, but it’s not a social media problem.

And on the global scale, there are some indicators that it might be a bigger problem there even than in the West. So one dimension is: if you have a lack of really reliable mainstream media outlets, then you do depend more on social media. That might be a problem. Of course, in autocracies, government has huge power over information, and sometimes they’ll push back against certain types of content moderation on platforms like Facebook. And so there might be more disinformation there.

And then finally, it just– it happens that all these platforms – particularly Facebook, but others – they just do not put the same resources into content moderation in these other places than they do in the West. Because it’s in the West that they are called up to sit in front of Congress and committees. It’s in the West that, you know, Europe has really quite extensive legislation regulating the Internet. And it turns out that these content moderation and various ways in which the platforms are self-regulating, it does actually take money and it takes manpower. And so they put almost all their resources into doing it in Western countries.

So there is some suspicion that things are, you know, messier and looser and more problematic in, say, the global South, in South America, or in Africa.

Lindsay: You’ve been a scholar of democracy for decades. And anyone who Googles “Simone Chambers” will find volumes and volumes of incredible research on, what democracy means, what the role of the citizen means, what is the public sphere, just an incredible life’s work thinking about this essential part of our civic life.

What’s the origin story of this interest? Why did you want to study this stuff?

Simone: So, I come from a political family. My mother was a political journalist and my father was a politician. And my first job when I finished college, before I went to graduate school, was writing speeches, for a politician, which I liked.

Lindsay: Really?

Simone: In Canada, yeah, in Ottawa.

But I remember very clearly having to write speeches, not– didn’t have lies in it, but, my MP came to me and said, “There’s a budget coming down.” She goes, “I hear that old people, who are retired, they’re eating dog food.”

And I said, “Oh, this is terrible.” So she said, “Go and look in our constituency and see how badly off they are. And if it’s really true that they’re so poor, they’re, they’re having such dire straits that they are buying, you know, dog food.”

Okay, so I went and did the research and, I came back and I said, “Well, you know, people are complaining about financial strife, they’re really strapped and this budget’s not good and things are bad, but I didn’t actually find anybody eating dog food.”

So, my MP – I will name no names – said, “Well, I think we should keep it in there anyway, because I heard that.”

And I said, “Well, I’m not sure about that…” So we had this tussle. And she basically made the argument that it’s a metaphor anyway. So in any case, I was like, straight out of college, I was, you know, writing for a backbencher. So it stayed in the speech.

Okay. So this was really a kind of wake-up. I mean, there were other reasons why I realized I was not cut out for real politics, but, this was a kind of wake-up to me that what people say, the information you have, it’s really important.

So then, like I said, I was not cut out for real politics, so I went to do a PhD in politics. And from the beginning, I was always interested in public speech, how representatives communicate with constituents, how things are reported in the media, how, basically, what we call the public sphere, which is political communication and information circulation, how it shapes democratic politics.

Lindsay: So we’re heading into another election season here in the U. S. and there’s a lot of concern about how consequential this election could be for the future of democracy. How should we think about disinformation in this context? What should voters be thinking about as they go into this next election?

Simone: So one of the new – technologically new – dimensions is AI. And there have already been some pretty concerted efforts to try to rein back AI.

So to give you an example, in the New Hampshire primary, there were these robocalls that had a voice that sounded a lot like Joe Biden.

Lindsay: That’s right!

Simone: Yeah, that, you know, were saying, “Ah, you don’t have to vote” or, you know, trying to suppress the turnout. And so now actually, the FCC – the Federal Communications Commission – has severely restricted robocalls with AI in them. So there’s going to be a lot of scrutiny of the use of AI.

And the other thing that I think is happening and ought to happen is that there has been a lot of movement to get out the vote, just to get people to vote. But now there’s a new movement, particularly taken on by the states – the states are the administrators of elections – that citizens really have very little knowledge about how votes are counted, what makes voting secure, why is voting ballots secure, what happens to people’s votes, all those kinds of things.

So there are new information campaigns going on all across the United States to inform people about: who counts the votes? How are they counted? What’s the backup system? Why is it really, really difficult to tamper with them? Because my intuition is that the most serious type of misinformation will be misinformation about the voting process that could lead to people claiming that no, we didn’t win or yes, we did win, or challenging – and perhaps violently challenging – the outcome. That would be the most serious and disastrous impact of misinformation on this election.

But there is a bit of sort of moral panic about disinformation, and it’s very strange because it has sort of ironic double effects. So on the one hand, it’s really great that most citizens, they care about the truth, they’re worried about disinformation, they are aware about disinformation, and so they’re more careful. And so that makes for more vigilant citizens and that’s good.

But it could also have the opposite effect of saying, “Oh my God, it’s that bad,” Like, you know, “if people are just so confused and have such bad information and so easily manipulated and so on then maybe democracy is not a great idea.”

Lindsay: This podcast series was motivated by the crisis in democracy that we seem to find ourselves in. You know, after surging growth of democracy in the 20th century. And now we’re seeing this kind of disenchantment that we seem to be seeing here in the U. S. and all over the world.

And so I wanted to end by asking you to reflect personally – and maybe even a little philosophically – about the question: if democracy is threatened, if there’s another model being shopped around, if dissatisfaction with life is so great that people are willing to forego some of the core values of democracy: is democracy worth saving? What do you think?

Simone: Oh, absolutely.

The fundamental first principle of democracy is political equality. Every citizen has the same standing and status as an equal member of the political community. Different democratic regimes organize that differently and, you know, divide the vote, you have proportional representation, all sorts of different ways of expressing that, but that is the first and fundamental principle.

And I think it’s both an important moral principle to remember, but I also think it’s an aspiration for trying to organize government in a way that is the maximally responsive to the most people, while protecting their rights.

And so autocracies – so far – do not have any better record on some of these, you know, problems. They might– some people say that some autocracies have better records, say, on equality, like if you look at China. But China was dragging itself out of, you know, a different era, like a kind of feudal era, that it’s not clear– and now it’s actually having quite serious inequality problems.

So, there’s no other regime that shows that it can outperform democracy. And all other regimes, I think, violate, you know, some of our most fundamental moral principles of equality and freedom. So I’m going to continue to fight for democracy.

Lindsay: Yeah, yeah, that’s interesting and the answer is yes, and it’s unequivocally yes for the podcast as well. But that the why involves a lot of thinking. And it’s two things. It’s what does democracy deliver? But beyond that, it is a value system. It’s not just about the end result. It’s about some moral, ethical value that we would do well to keep in mind.

Simone: Yeah, I agree with that.

Lindsay: Simone Chambers, thanks so much for being with us on Talking Policy.

Simone: Take care.

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Outro

In our next episode, we’ll talk with UCLA political scientist Marty Gilens about the corrosive role money plays in U.S. elections…and how the wealthy seem to have an increasingly outsized influence in our politics.

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Credits

Thanks for listening to “Democracy and Its Discontents,” a special miniseries from Talking Policy. I’m your host, Lindsay Shingler.

Our production partner for this mini series is CitizenRacecar. This episode was produced by Anna Van Dine. Mixing and sound design by Alex Brouwer. Special thanks to Kevin Stockdale at KUCI.

Talking Policy is a production of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

 

The UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) is a research network comprised of scholars from across the University of California and the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories that conducts policy-relevant research to mitigate conflict and promote a more peaceful world order. Our focus is on challenges that have the potential to lead to wide-scale conflict, and that can benefit from global cooperation to solve. Our portfolio includes both traditional security issues—defense innovation, strategy and deterrence, nuclear weapons policy, and security cooperation—and emerging and non-traditional challenges such as climate change, geoeconomics and great power competition, and threats to democracy. In each of these areas, IGCC builds diverse, multidisciplinary research teams that analyze the causes and consequences of global conflict—and help develop practical solutions.