Why Do People Fall for Propaganda? New Directions in Disinformation Research

An important conversation with Friedrich Moser, director of How To Build a Truth Engine

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Our guest will be Barbara Walter, Rohr Professor at UC San Diego. She is one of the world’s leading authorities on political instability, violence, and democratic decline. She is the author of the NY Times bestseller How Civil Wars Start and has advised the Departments of Defense, State, CIA, and other institutions on global instability. Walter was named Peacemaker of the Year in 2022 (by the National Conflict Resolution Center). She publishes the Substack newsletter Here Be Dragons: Warning Signs from the Edges of Democracy.

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What do engineers, neuroscientists, data scientists, journalists, and computational folklorists have in common? They are among the groups of professionals who are approaching the problem of disinformation in new ways, as presented in the documentary film How To Build a Truth Engine, which was directed by Friedrich Moser and produced by George Clooney, and is starting its worldwide release.

Friedrich Moser kindly made clips exclusively for Lucid subscribers. They are available for download here. You can also view the trailer of this important film here.

I am now making available to all Lucid subscribers this video of our April 10 conversation about the new frontiers of research on disinformation.

StoryMiner, data analysis of QAnon media sources and networks. Courtesy of Friedrich Moser.

We often hear disinformation discussed in terms of markets and processes of media capture: when bad actors and authoritarian governments reshape the information environment by taking over media properties, suing and harassing professional and independent journalists to silence them, and paying off influencers to spout lies. The goals are to bury facts and concepts that would be threatening to their power, and feed the public a diet of falsehoods, conspiracy theories, character assassinations of enemies, and assertions meant to destroy our trust in each other and in democratic institutions.

We can also analyze the political arrangements and structures that give lies their power, exposing how a single falsehood fits into larger networks of disinformation, which come to create an alternate worldview. This is key to the operation of propaganda. It is not about getting people to believe a single lie, but changing the way they think via the associations they form, the conclusions they draw, and the emotions they feel. An effective propaganda apparatus is holistic in its scope, its methods, and its outcomes.

Here is an early Lucid piece that explores why people have fallen for the lies told them by demagogues past and present.

Why Do People Believe Liars?

In a January 2021 CNN op-ed, I unpacked Donald Trump’s Big Lie that he won the 2020 election, noting that it “worked” on people because they had been prepared to accept it by thousands of other lies he told, which together made up a system of “institutionalized lying.”

A leader’s Big Lie has no power and makes little sense on its own. It has traction only if the public has been fed many, many smaller lies. It relies on a larger network of falsehoods told by the leader and reinforced by his government officials and compliant media. The Big Lie works because it is part of an established alternate belief system – an edifice of lies, assembled piece by piece.

Focusing only on the Big Lie misses the big picture. It fails to convey the scope and gravity of the institutionalized lying that was Trump’s biggest weapon. And it obscures the way minds were worn down, day after day, by one lie after another after another. Trump’s aim in his ceaseless lying was to get his followers to trust him alone as the arbiter of reality and to distrust everyone and everything else – especially the democratic system that stood in the way of his amassing sufficient power to become untouchable.

This exposure of the methods used by Trump and his allies hit a nerve: my op-ed was cited in the complaint of Trump’s 2022 lawsuit against CNN (which was dismissed by a Trump-appointed judge).

We can also broaden our lens to examine how institutionalized lying operates: you need people willing to tell your lie in public, whether those are elected officials, teachers, preachers, journalists, and other trusted intermediaries. You need lawyers willing to go to court to uphold your lies, and judges who will ignore reality and rule in your favor when those lies are disputed.

I address these approaches in a recent essay that previewed Moser’s film:

"How to Build a Truth Engine": The Fight Against Disinformation

Moser’s film addresses the new focus on the brain in disinformation research: on pattern recognition, on cognitive processes, and how the mind needs a steady stream of accurate information to make sense of the world. What happens if that stream becomes polluted?

Information warfare is fought not just in newsrooms and on social media platforms, but in human minds. If we better understand how the mind works, we can be prepared to come up with correctives and counter-measures, such as the truth engine envisioned in the film.

We also need to work on shifting attitudes about regulating social media platforms, imposing accountability norms for speech that defrauds the public and contributes to the incitement of violence and hatred toward targeted groups.

We also need a paradigm shift around the idea that we have a right to truth, and around the value and function we give truth in society. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, is among those who now consider truthful information as a public good.

I will be writing about this in my next book, Resisting Autocracy. At the heart of democracy is the belief that every person deserves to be treated with respect and that citizens have a right to accurate public information. Standing up for truths, and exposing autocratic practices of lying, is essential resistance work.