Know Your News Source (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

Russian matryoshka toys with portraits of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump for sale at a Moscow souvenir kiosk

“Know Your News Source” is an educational program that I presented to some 20 audiences around the state between September 2017 and the start of the pandemic. I have shared my materials with other presenters in Arkansas and beyond who feel called to help their neighbors navigate the sea of misinformation in which we are all swimming. It’s a losing battle.

Bumper-sticker mentality was a problem before social media, but it required acquiring a bumper sticker and deciding that sharing a nuance-free opinion with tail-gaters was worth putting sticky gunk on the car’s bumper. Now spreading opinions — and, all too often, demonstrably false information from unknown sources — can be done with a click.

And with no negative repercussions, unless I’m one of your spoilsport Facebook friends who insist on pointing out that, no, Mel Gibson never actually said that Hollywood is an institutionalized pedophile ring. Or that 39 sex-trafficked children were not in reality rescued from a double-wide in Georgia.

Back in 2016, as we all now know, the social media environment that Americans invented was being used against us. Kremlin-backed entities used Facebook and Twitter to sow division and disinformation for the purpose of hurting the presidential candidate least favorable to Russian interests (Hillary Clinton) and helping Russia’s preferred candidate (Donald Trump).

(Don’t @ me, bro. If you doubt Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings, read the report from the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee.)

These Russian psy-ops goons seem to know how gullible we are; their social media accounts ranged from @TEN_GOP, which called itself the unofficial Twitter account of Tennessee Republicans and attracted more than 100,000 followers, to a Facebook page called Blacktivist, which in 2016 had more followers than the actual Black Lives Matter page.

Other Russian social media accounts used all-American names like “Being Patriotic,” “Heart of Texas” and “Secured Borders.”

Why would Americans fall for that stuff back then — and keep falling for it now? I keep thinking back on the words of David Kris, who once led the Department of Justice’s National Security Division. In the wake of the troll farm indictment, Kris said the Russian peddlers of misinformation had identified “a fundamental weakness of our democracy, that our very proud marketplace of ideas is so easily flooded with counterfeit gray goods, and to the great detriment of our political discussions and our political systems.”

And then Kris, in the same 2018 interview, used words that feel even more meaningful in 2020: “Broadly speaking, we have developed a little bit of a virus here as an open democracy with free information flow,” he said. “As part of that virus, we’ve got to develop a better immune system, culturally and maybe legally, to deal with it.”

At the time, Kris thought that Mueller’s indictment of the Russian trolls might “be part of a developing immune system to this sort of conduct.” But, of course, we know that leaders of our federal government discouraged us from paying attention to Mueller’s findings, so our body politic is as vulnerable as we were four years ago. Maybe more so.

Since American society has become polarized and divided beyond Putin’s wildest dreams, left-leaning Americans believe that only the right-wingers are fooled by disinformation on social media — and vice versa. That kind of smug confidence in our own ability to rightly divide the truth is fatal.

A photo of Mel Gibson beside a fabricated quote about Hollywood pedophiles is easy to check out. Reuters, the London-based news service that was founded in 1851, reported: “A spokesperson for Mel Gibson told Reuters via email that the claims are ‘100% fake.’”

But how about the rumor that 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse’s mother drove him from their home in Illinois to Kenosha, Wisconsin, with the AR-15 that he allegedly used to kill two protesters? That spread like wildfire on Twitter, but I couldn’t find a single reputable news organization that reported anything close to that. I did find multiple mainstream reports in which Rittenhouse’s lawyer said the rifle belonged to a Wisconsin resident and was never carried across the state line at all.

Here’s a great rule of thumb: The more you want to believe something, the more you need to look for multiple confirmations from sources that you know.

I’ll present an updated, virtual version of “Know Your News Source” for Central Arkansas Library System at 6:30 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 21. I would be honored if you would register at CALS.org.

Gwen Moritz is the editor of Arkansas Business.