The Washington Post recently posted a job notice looking for a reporter on “digital threats.” I was reminded of something Josh Barro of Business Insider, reliably the most sensible of all similarly positioned prominent columnists, tweeted in March: “Some very loud reporters (often self-appointed ‘disinformation’ czars) have just led a fairly successful campaign to convince people within the industry that criticizing their work is morally wrong. This [disinformation] beat has been like a brain poison inside newsrooms, making reporters arrogant about criticism at a time when the industry can least afford it. And the arrogance is structural. If the whole premise of your beat is ‘people believe wrong things, this is turning our society into a dystopia, I will make people believe the right things,’ then, of course, you will end up with an authoritarian attitude when people object.”
Barro’s thread is funny only because it is blunt about the utter pointlessness of one of the hottest fields in academia and journalism, which nonetheless operates with no self-definition and according to no rules. The elevation of lies and stupidity to “disinformation” after the “fake news” panic that Hillary Clinton started and Donald Trump repurposed in 2016 always relied on believing online communications were a sort of dark magic. To believe that the present moment is historically unusual in terms of the spread of b.s. requires believing that before the first email was sent in 1971, nobody had much success at spreading mass lies or creating dangerous, enthusiastic political movements. But unless you just fear technology and work back from there, it’s obvious that the past is full of mass delusion and dictatorship compared to right now. Regular old gossip and demagoguery always got along just fine without being “networked.” The fault lies not in our servers, but in ourselves.
Perhaps because people are beginning to notice the illiberalism inherent in thinking that the votes of “low-information” voters are less legitimate than those of supposed “high-information” voters, the tide may be turning against the terminology of “disinformation.” And so, those who continue to make such a point have begun to rebrand. As a recent Atlantic article by a scholar of internet dangers explains: “Far from being merely a target, the public has become an active participant in creating and selectively amplifying narratives that shape realities. Perhaps the best word for this emergent bottom-up dynamic is one that doesn’t exist quite yet: ampliganda, the shaping of perception through amplification.” You see, “It’s not disinformation. Our politics is awash in ampliganda, the propaganda of the modern age.” According to Renee DiResta and her ilk, “ampliganda” is a new and more sinister version of something whose origins trace back to the propaganda 1.0 of the Inquisition, except that the current information space is somehow more sinister and sophisticated and hard to navigate.
As a case study, the article describes how a confluence of algorithmic dumb luck and mutual political dislike caused the hashtag #PelosiMustGo to do well for several hours online when a left-wing Pelosi challenger tweeted it and then right-wing Twitter personalities with lots of followers boosted it. The article notes how despite the viral Twitter hashtag, “the ultimate victory, of course, would be Pelosi’s.” This observation seems pretty important, almost as if to undermine the entire scaremongering argument being attempted. But never mind how “ampliganda” is a meaningless category that can’t be shown to change anything. The people whose jobs rely on ginning up panic about fake news, digital threats, disinformation, “ampliganda,” and whatever phrase comes next will keep trying to convince you we’re in uncharted territory. They’ll keep being wrong.
