According to Applebaum, one of the key tactics that autocracies use to encourage citizens to opt out of any type of democratic process is a firehose of falsehoods1. When presented with something bad the regime did the autocrat will produce as many reasons as possible that the bad thing, be it corruption or literally killing their citizens, is not correct and is really a blatant lie or had a good reason behind it.
They killed all those people in a village not because it had gold they wanted to extract, they were plotting against the government. Maybe they had ties to a foreign government, maybe they ran a child sex trafficking ring, they worshipped a backwards spirit from the jungle and were sacrificing children. When justifying heinous acts, plausibility doesn’t matter the goal is quantity so that enough people will find something plausible in one of the falehoods.
It doesn’t matter if there is any truth at all in the statements, the point is that you see so many excuses for their corruption that you figure one of them must have some merit. Better yet, you drift into nihilism because you can’t keep track of all the faleshoods so why even bother. You’re overloaded trying to keep track of all the shit being passed around, it’s too much work to maintain any engagement so you withdraw from any type of civic engagement.
This is a favourite tactic of the autocrat used to discredit any opposition. No the autocrat isn’t corrupt, the opposition is. Oh they also molest children, are backed by that foreign government we hate, and like food you don’t like. You shouldn’t listen to them when they say anything.
If you can’t understand what is going on around you, then you are not going to join a great movement for democracy, or follow a truth-telling leader, or listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead you will avoid politics all together. Autocrats have an enormous incentive to spread hopelessness and cynicism, not only in their own countries, but around the world. – Autocracy Inc Pg 79
Apathy is a powerful tool of the autocrat and social media is a great tool autocrats can use to spread their firehose of faleshoods. Accounts are easy to set up, and in the press to publish before everyone else, facts don’t get the rigorous validation they should get. A faleshood spreads and is taken as fact while the truth or retraction doesn’t spread nearly as far.
This isn’t just on social media the pattern repeats itself in scientific papers. Scientific papers suffer the same phenomenon. The sensational paper with findings we didn’t expect travels wide, the retraction because the data was bad gets a short mention and is barely read so people go on believing the sensational headline.
Possibly the most famous, and still influential, example of this is the Wakefield paper and retraction. The paper claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. It wasn’t just a bit wrong, the data was falsified but as of 2019 the paper is still cited as fact and gave fuel to the anti-science anti-vaccine movement resulting in outbreaks of measles, a disease once eradicated in Canada.
The autocrat hasn’t seen a retraction that they don’t love. Any retraction is used to show that the scientific community is a bunch of liars. Any foible in the opposition can be used to discredit them. Any issue in a democratic country is leveraged to show that it’s worse there than it is in the autocratic state2. Retraction and changing views is exactly how scientific discovery should work as Adam Grant reminds us in our book from April.
Every time we encounter new information, we have a choice. We can attach our opinions to our identities and stand our ground in the stubbornness of preaching and prosecuting. Or we can operate more like scientists, defining ourselves as people committed to the pursuit of truth – even if it means proving our own views wrong. – Think Again Pg 76
To combat autocrats we need to recognize the tactics of propaganda: false equivalence, whataboutism, flooding, “just asking questions,” cherry-picking and remember the paradox of tolerance. In a liberal open society, there are some ideas we need to just say “fuck no” to and throw them out immediately without giving them debate. If a group is advocating violence against a group of “others” we say no. If they’re pushing for the destruction of democratic institutions, we shut them down right away.
Michael B. Tager shared a story on Twitter3 once that I think is a perfect example of this. The story goes that a guy was in a bar once and as soon as a guy sat next to him the bartender said “no. get out”. Upon protest the bartender reached for a bat and said “out. now”. In the bartender’s experience the first guy wearing Nazi stuff is nice, and so is his second friend and maybe even the third one. But then they stop being cool and quiet and you’re in a fucking Nazi bar because you tolerated the first one. When the end goal is to build a violent authoritarian or genocidal political movement, you can’t tolerate them at all.
Fuck no, get out now.
- Autocracy Inc Pg 79 ↩︎
- Autocracy Inc Pg 74, 76 ↩︎
- Michael B Tager has left the Nazi bar ↩︎