The "MyBarackObama" Experiment

Have you heard?  The Obama campaign has set up a web site to empower its supporters to combat false information circulating about the candidate and his wife.  This promises to shed light on the PR conundrum as to whether publicity douses misinformation or sends it rocketing onward.

Fightthesmears.com goes farther than the standard repertoire of anti-misinformation tactics:  denouncements, denials, refutations, a rapid-response “war room,” and a “check the facts” web site.  Visitors to the Obama site, launched June 12, are encouraged to sign up for bulletins.  They are also asked to “push back now” by loading contacts from their software address books into a message template and alerting their personal network about the latest correction.  (The Obama campaign promises that it does not harvest the email addresses.)

This initiative to enlist the people flows out of the political dictum that dignified silence in today’s world is tantamount to unconditional surrender.  It's the lesson of the Swift Boats, upgraded for the advent of social media.  But Fightthesmears.com runs up against amply confirmed social scientific theories of selective exposure and cognitive dissonance.  We are all prisoners of our preferences and prejudices, remembering statements that confirm them while rejecting or discounting information to the contrary.  By this logic, truth-warriors only make things worse: they spread a slur even though it comes wrapped inside a persuasive refutation.

Which approach works better?  We are about to find out…something.  A simple answer to the question seems unlikely, because the experiment is quite complex.  The Obama campaign approach relies on peer-to-peer communication, but also on publicizing the novelty and urgency of said reliance through mass media.  A feature story in Saturday’s Washington Post glamorized the detective work of a Princeton academic who traced one seemingly inextinguishable rumor back to a 2004 political opponent of Obama’s.  That gentleman promptly staged a red herring of a news conference to ask aloud why a tax-exempt university (actually, the Institute for Advanced Study) would tolerate such partisan activity as to pin misinformation on him.  He also sent a letter to the Post’s ombudsman on the plausible notion that the reporter probably got tipped off about the academic’s work by the Obama campaign.  He does not deny being the fire-starter, by the way.  Nor does he reassert the accuracy of what he charged.  Accordingly, I have chosen not to link to his statement or mention his name.  But others may --in which case, the rumor flame will leap the wall to which I am contributing.

There is reason to be optimistic.  A recent Pew survey found that 60% of Internet users agree that the medium contains “misinformation and propaganda that too many voters believe is accurate.”  That’s a provisional cause for comfort because if a majority is worried about what other people are learning online, it means that they possess a modicum of skepticism, and may be amenable to adopting a best practice for dealing with rumors on a regular basis. 

That practice consists of using the net to consider, first, the source of a disputed and/or disturbing truth-claim (via Google); second, the prevalent pattern of interpretation (partisan/bipartisan, easily scanned for national news via Memeorandum), and, third, the best available evidence (a matter of recognizing authenticated documents).  Truth claims anchored in viewable evidence and attributable to a source acknowledged as credible on a bipartisan basis stand a decent chance of being valid. That's a practice worth spreading.