… And Then There’s Disinformation
I write opinion pieces in Warp & Woof. I feel I’m allowed to express opinions in writing, then disseminate them to the public (who may or may not read them). Many other writers of blogs, on opinion pages of newspaper sites, in magazines, and on TV cable news, do the same. It’s called freedom of expression. Many say it is all protected by the First Amendment. But I think it’s useful to be a bit circumspect about these things.
There are good faith and bad faith arguments made in opinion pieces. Good faith arguments admit that they are opinions, in one way or another, through language devices like “So-and-so thinks that ____”, or “according to so-and-so …”. We are all familiar with such devices in print and in speaking. Their power of persuasion depends upon convincing logic, authority of sources, and acknowledging community affinities (“We in the _____ group believe this”) — perhaps some combination of these factors. All of these arguments are fine. Humility is their salient characteristic.
Bad faith argumentation, on the other hand, places strong emphasis on its assertion being “true” – almost like a bully intimidating the audience. For sure, knowledge is defined as “justified true belief” (JTB in philosophy)on some level. But conveying knowledge to a reader or listener requires them to corroborate its trueness through their personal experience, previous exposure to similar arguments such that the assertions aren’t questioned, or because of prohibitive difficulty in making an opposing assertion. Bullying intimidation is one way of increasing the cost of opposition. In extreme cases, the writer or speaker may even throw a morality bomb at the audience: “You are a bad person if you don’t believe this!”
Some maintain that all propaganda is an example of bad faith argumentation, since it appeals to non-rational, emotional predispositions of the audience. Edward Bernays, the early 20th century father of modern public relations and advertising theory would disagree. Bernays maintained that propaganda was no different than any other advertising – just directed by the state during wartime. I wouldn’t object too strongly to his thesis, and I’m inclined to call any commercial advertising a form of bad faith argument. How many of us buy stuff based solely upon rational analysis of the benefits versus costs of the purchase?
So, we need to be receptive to good faith argumentation, and resistant to bad faith arguments, right? Seems like a simple formula for negotiating an information-dense world. We can acquire knowledge for good decision-making and ignore manipulative appeals to our emotions that get us into trouble. Unfortunately, discernment of the good versus the bad is not so easy.
The manipulators, the bullies, the bad faith arguers, are very smart! They tend to be strategic – operating from a long-range plan to sway public opinion or increase business. And you rarely get an admission from a bad faith arguer that they don’t really believe what they are saying but are merely being paid to say it. The strategic nature of much bad faith advertising and political messaging has led to recent popularity of the term “disinformation,” an English translation of the Russian dezinformatsiya, invented by Stalin in 1923 for a new “black ops” branch of the KGB. It originally was the Soviet long-term strategy for gaining political victories over the capitalist enemies by convincing large segments of the decision-making population (i.e., the readers) in the West that certain things were true which were really fabrications.
Disinformation is deeper than mere propaganda, and possibly accrues benefits only after many years. It implies that knowledge itself, over time, can be fabricated. Past examples include campaigns by the Czech secret service in the 1960s to convince Western Europeans that many of their leaders were former Nazi sympathizers, or “Operation INFEKTION” in the 1980s where the Soviet black ops bureau conducted a worldwide campaign claiming that AIDS was a U.S. biological warfare invention. It’s noteworthy that neither of these campaigns had astounding success, but that leads us to one of the major goals of disinformation campaigns: Convince enough people that something is true to exacerbate political and social divisions in the target population, thus weakening their respective governments. The U.S. has undertaken similar disinformation campaigns, presumably learning from the Soviet playbook, such as false stories in the 1980s of Pentagon plans to attack Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Libya – accepted and reported by both the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post as fact. Disinformation constitutes the most obvious case of bad faith argumentation – it’s called lying!
Propaganda and public relations are usually more subtle than outright disinformation. Rather than blatant lying, an effort is made to highlight disagreeable truths about certain groups or beliefs, or to illustrate vast gulfs between certain public positions and the opposing positions, or perhaps embellish the image of the truly positive characteristics of a favored position. Bad faith arguments in propaganda posters, opinion pieces, social media memes, art, and film — mostly seen since World War I — have been employed by powerful actors (nations at war, large corporations with big advertising budgets) to either vilify competitors or make non-rational assertions about the benefits of a product or cause. We take such bad faith argumentation for granted in political campaigns. We mute TV commercials. We scroll past online ads and delete broadcast emails. Our resistance defenses are often so great as to make nearly impossible any penetration into public consciousness of positive good faith messaging. It sometimes seems that real knowledge is unattainable given our cynical world view.
Yet, disinformation campaigns seldom work that well. The American philosopher Edmund Gettier has given us the “Gettier Problem” in epistemology, which posits that justification for true beliefs is often faulty or weak, leaving much of what we call “knowledge” not safely true. But we can often decide for ourselves whether a belief is justified or not, and even if the probability of the justification being false is greater than zero (especially these days with the lightning advances of science), many beliefs seem reasonably solid. Some of my favorites include: 1) most people like being social; 2) material security is universally desirable; and, 3) threats to physical safety vary with time, place, and activity. It seems entirely possible to build a good society around such principles, and others, that most of us can acknowledge are true beliefs. All we need to do is spend more time thinking about them, and less on the likelihood of false justifications.
Let the arguments continue but watch for the humility of the good faith presenter – and resist bullying from the bad faith presenter!
— William Sundwick
Warp and Woof 