At a glance.
- Why people fall for elaborate nonsense.
- Google TAG disrupts a Chinese influence network.
- Russia frames its invasion as a matter of constitutional law.
Why people fall for elaborate nonsense.
Business Insider offers an overview of some research into why people swallow conspiracy theories in particular, but, more broadly, why they fall for elaborately constructed hogwash in general. They review the usual suspects. "Social scientists are closing in on some answers. The personality traits known as the "Dark Triad" — that's narcissism, psychopathy, and a tendency to see the world in black-or-white terms — play a part. So do political beliefs, particularly populism and a tolerance for political violence. Cognitive biases, like believing only evidence that confirms what you already think, also make people more vulnerable."
One of the most characteristic conditions of vulnerability to specious nonsense is, researchers think (and here they confirm centuries of philosophical insight) is confidence, or overconfidence, the assumption that you're easily able to distinguish the true from the false. A study in progress by Gordon Pennycook, Jabin Binnendyk, and David Rand concludes that "those who come to accept conspiracy theories not only relied more intuition, but also overestimated their performance on numeracy and perception tests (i.e. were overconfident in their own abilities).This relationship with overconfidence was robust to controlling for analytic thinking, need for uniqueness, and narcissism, and was strongest for the most fringe conspiracies." And they also tend to think lots of people agree with them. "We also found that conspiracy believers–particularly overconfident ones –massively overestimated(>4x) how much others agree with them: Although conspiracy beliefs were in the majority in only 12% of 150 conspiracies across three studies, conspiracy believers thought themselves to be in the majority 93% of the time."
How do you help people achieve clarity? No one really knows, especially in a culture that's been telling itself for decades that high self-esteem is the core virtue.
Google TAG disrupts a Chinese influence network.
Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has released a report outlining its efforts to disrupt the massive spam network DRAGONBRIDGE. It’s got a small audience but it pumps out a lot of spam through hundreds of thousands of inauthentic or hijacked accounts.
DRAGONBRIDGE is a China-based influence network that works across several platforms. The researchers note that most of the network’s posts are “low quality content without a political message, populated across many channels and blogs.” TAG has taken down more than 100,000 of the network’s accounts. Despite the network’s size, DRAGONBRIDGE has received very little engagement from real people. 95% of its blogs received fewer than ten visits, and most of its videos had fewer than one-hundred views. The researchers also note that most of the engagement the posts received were from other DRAGONBRIDGE accounts.
The quality of the content DRAGONBRIDGE pushes has been pretty low. TAG says, “Most of their posts are spammy, nonsensical material without an overt political message — often clips of animals, landscapes, food, sports and other content. Blurry visuals, garbled audio, poor translations, malapropisms, and mispronunciations are also common. The content is often hastily produced and error-prone — for example, neglecting to remove Lorem Ipsum text from a video.”
The researchers also note that “a small fraction” of the accounts push more coherent posts relating to current events, adding a pro-China spin. Most of these posts were written in Mandarin, and focused on negative stories about the US.
Russia frames its invasion as a matter of constitutional law.
Russia has with increasing frequency insisted that the Ukrainian territories are now, under both domestic and international law, integral and unalienable parts of Russia. This found expression most recently in remarks delivered by diplomat Konstantin Gavrilov at a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe: “If Washington and NATO give Kyiv weapons to strike peaceful cities deep inside Russia and try to seize the territories that constitutionally belong to Russia, it will force Moscow to take harsh retaliatory action. Don’t tell us then that we haven’t warned you.”