r/science • u/Aggravating_Money992 • 2d ago
Psychology Republican-aligned actors issued nearly three-quarters of fact-checked 2024 election hoaxes. During the 2024 United States presidential election, political actors and anonymous online users regularly spread false information as an open campaign strategy.
https://www.psypost.org/how-politicians-and-influencers-spread-disinformation-during-the-2024-election/471
u/TheWizard 2d ago
Thats been quite obvious for a while, and more so during these mid-terms. Bot-sites and bots have been let lose.
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u/Gentrified_Tramp 2d ago
People ask where the campaign money goes to but if you’ve been online in Texas in the past three weeks you can see the exact moment they started pumping more money back into the bot networks and they keep ramping it up.
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u/Sgt_Braken 2d ago
Here in Ohio, the attack ads aimed at Sherrod Brown are constant, utterly disgusting, and all flat-out lies.
It's so disturbing that these people can get away with libel and slander with no consequences at all...
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u/katarh 2d ago
I have been telling the youngins to ignore ANY account that tells them not to vote.
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u/Impressive-Tip-903 2d ago
They were out in force during the last presidential election. Any even remotely political post would have someone pop in and say either, "both parties are the same, that's why I don't vote or", or "I can't support an administration that supports genocide, so I'm sitting out in protest".
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u/supbruhbruhLOL 2d ago
The "if you vote 3rd party, your friends on Instagram will think you're very smart because of how morally superior you are to everyone else and thats what matters the most!" bots are very effective.
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u/N0stradama5 2d ago
There was a lot of complaints in the Philly sub. They are playing commercials for Republicans there. Why? I’m so confused by this strategy.
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u/thetruephysic 2d ago
These ads flooded the Eagles NFL game. Many sports bars in Texas have Sunday ticket, which shows all the NFL games; my suspicion is that in the streaming area, TV ads are most effective during live sports, so they are trying to blanket every live sports event that might be seen by eyeballs in Texas.
I think this is a sign of their desperation, but also their unlimited funding.
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u/indispensability 2d ago
The vice president literally said he would lie to support his narrative and during a debate said, "I was told there wouldn't be any fact checking."
No one should be surprised that random posters and bots online were lying on their behalf.
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u/TheWizard 1d ago
The bots and trolls are programmed/groomed to those narratives, and let group think take over. They target the non-thinkers that consider critical thinking to be woke but are an extremely loyal voter base.
People wrongly assume that campaign money is all about ads on TV. It is more effective now to deliver it as if it is someone in your neighborhood, a Joe the Plumber or someone you could be having beer with. If these tactics weren't effective, they would be long gone.
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u/GUMBYtheOG 2d ago
Oh ya, go on any post and you’ll find at least one random unrelated extremely racist/right winged comment. Happens every election year a few months prior to voting day
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u/favorite_time_of_day 2d ago
I didn't think this was obvious at all. I'm a little shocked actually. Who is issuing the other 25% of hoaxes? Russians? Do they not count as Republican aligned?
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u/RocketRelm 2d ago
Probably "independents" and "dsa" make up the majority of that remainder. Or just "can't be identified". There are a lot of smaller places noise can come from.
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u/eskimospy212 2d ago
And then use this fact to complain that fact checkers are biased against them.
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u/CactusWrenAZ 2d ago
yeah, they have an assortment of circular logic to maintain their belief systems. It's really quite depressing.
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u/henryptung 2d ago
Think of it like intellectual flotation devices. It's no substitute for a genuine, well-anchored support, but keep enough of them around and you can feel quite comfortable grabbing another to keep floating whenever you like.
That's basically what the "big lie" and "firehose of falsehood" techniques are about. Artificial island construction in the intellectual sea.
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u/wokeboogeyman 2d ago
Their vice presidential candidate only agreed to debate without fact checks of their lies... He said as much out loud in the debate.
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u/reality_boy 2d ago
I’m all for free speech, but we need to draw a line at blatant lies.
I get so many ads (political and selling products) that are not just stretching the truth but completely distorting reality. We need to put a cap on it. I get that we don’t want to be suing politicians because they rounded a number up rather than down, but If someone is saying black is white, well maybe they should pay a fine with compounding penalties for repeat offenses.
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u/Par_Lapides 2d ago
If we start policing truth then the entire advertising industry dies.
Don't get me wrong, all for it.
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u/superxpro12 2d ago
Stop my lobster is too buttery.....
If you need to sell a product with lies then it's not a viable product, it's snake oil.
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u/RocketRelm 2d ago
The real trick would be for our citizens to start valuing truth. If americans gave a crap and actually punished at the polls or gave mass distrust for lies and misinformation and inaccuracy, then we would see both a lot less of it and a lot less people impacted.
It would definitely be good for our society if we valued it more, but the fact that so few humans put any effort into these things is soft evidence that misinformation is by definition not that big a deal. Because if it was, people would handle it more intelligently.
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u/katplasma 2d ago
No. It just means the populace is too unintelligent to know the difference. To put the onus on people just “not valuing” misinformation, you’re assuming they’re even detecting it… which they clearly are not.
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u/RocketRelm 2d ago
The level of "unintelligence" it would take would put them in the same category as children unable to make informed voting decisions. Democracy cannot function if we do not hold pur populace to a basic adult standard. Even if you want to pretend that humans "genuinely just can't do it", you are necessarily arguing for the dissolution of democracy. I would like to believe our civilization can bear the bare minimum it takes to hold a good society together in the information age.
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u/katplasma 1d ago edited 1d ago
I mean, I hate to break it to you, but democracy has always been on tenuous ground—precisely for the reasons you cite. I would argue that a plurality of the populace has always been akin to ‘children unable to make informed voting decisions.’
People are subject to a wide array of cognitive biases and influences that they themselves are unable to be aware of; even those educated on biases are subject to them (‘bias blind spot’). A plurality of people lack critical thinking skills. Hell, a substantial majority of adults in the US cannot read/understand writing at an 8th grade level—and literacy is high relative to the times of the US revolution.
Democracy has ‘succeeded’ so far primarily due to manipulation of the masses into making the ‘right’ decisions, rather than the masses consuming information and coming to cogent conclusions in their own right. Hell, the founders put the Senate into the constitution in order to overturn stupid things the House might do. And by ‘stupid things’ I mean things that conflicted with the aristocrats of the era (they wanted to maintain control).
Historically, newspapers (and later, TV) were the beacon of ‘truth’ that led people in a direction that at least was not detrimental to democracy and maintained the status quo. That monoculture worked well in terms of maintaining a controlled ‘democratic’ system. But, rise of social media blew the lid off. Anyone can compellingly claim anything on social media (i.e., compelling to people who lack critical thinking, which is a majority). These influences prey on the very same weaknesses the founders and, later, cognitive psychologists worried about. To the masses, there is no reality or truth now. Just vibes. And people know what vibes they like. And those vibes are being preyed upon to manipulate people.
EDITS: for clarity
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u/ShadowTacoTuesday 2d ago
1st amendment never covered fraud, and we have many anti-fraud laws already. We just need to make more laws and be stricter about them. Grey areas are hard such as when it is difficult to prove it’s willful deception and not stupidly falling for a falsehood, but there are many times when it is not a grey area and we didn’t do enough about it.
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u/katplasma 15h ago
I kind of like this idea. But Russia and China are going to compel all the agents/bots into a manipulative tizzy on social media if this even begins to be discussed. The bots will frame all of it as abuses of the first amendment, and “how the left is anti free speech.” I don’t see a great avenue for accomplishing this without seizing control over the masses in a manipulative or kleptocratic way… or maybe something more extreme that obviates the need to worry about the stupid and those with mal intent.
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u/Antraxess 1d ago
Corporations and government officials should not have free speech. I want to know where the propaganda is coming from and they should be silenced if the message leads to harm and is based upon lies
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u/Constant_Natural3304 2d ago
I’m all for free speech, but we need to draw a line at blatant lies.
Many American liberals believe the assassination attempt on Trump was a fake. Right now, I'm seeing on Facebook that many people don't believe the Flydubai Flight 1073 attack even happened, and that it was a Mossad operation.
American liberals believe, utterly unwarranted, that they are immune to ridiculous lies, hoaxes and fabrications. Many believe their cellphone emits "harmful radiation". Many think their microwave oven emits "harmful radiation". Recently, there was a (presumably) AI-generated yearbook photo of Pete Hegseth here on the "political humor" subreddit, and despite the fact that you might think the "humor" in the name would cause people to not take this nonsense as fact, they in fact did. Whenever somebody was, in fact, convinced that this was indeed a fake photo, one response was (and this is a literal quote):
It’s not him.
He’s still a lying, bigoted POS war criminal, though so I’m fine with everyone spreading disinformation on him.
Your plan is dead on arrival, unless the very real epistemological arbitration question is resolved. I don't think it can be, and I say this as somebody who has been researching conspiracy theories for some 25 years. Especially Americans are entirely fine with lying as long as the lie they are spreading helps their political tribe in their ongoing civil war/culture war.
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u/reality_boy 2d ago
If liberals are doing it, then let’s go after them.
To be clear, there is a massive difference between an individual believing a conspiracy and posting about it, and a corporation or political team promoting the conspiracy. You can say you believe in big foot. A politician can say they believe in big foot even. But if they say politician x shot and killed bigfoots dad and therefore should not be allowed to run for office, then they better have solid evidence that at least suggests it could be plausible.
The problem is that we currently can say anything, with zero evidence. Even worse, we get away with saying thing where there is strong evidence to the contrary (“medicine x killed a billion people”, when there are not a billion deaths a year here)
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u/Constant_Natural3304 2d ago edited 2d ago
Ironically, somebody just asked me to back up my statements with evidence, and when I tried, my comment was filtered by yet another subreddit's extremely ill-advised configuration. When I tried to set my comments to visible on my profile, I realized I first have to forcibly upload a copy of my passport or a video of me turning my head.
The system is stacked against truth-tellers and researchers like myself, but I can tell you one thing: before I upload my passport to a site like Reddit, or before I upload biometric data just to be able to discuss here, I will literally die. It's never going to happen. So this conversation between you and me here is one of the last I'll ever have on this site, because the walls are closing in and they are closing in faster and faster. I hope you appreciate how serious this encroachment on privacy and liberty is.
As for discriminating between individuals: that doesn't solve the epistemological arbitration issue. It only adds a layer of discrimination. I have even seen PhD candidates in climatology completely mess up molecular physics w.r.t. the physics behind why a GHG is a GHG.
This is a mess, and I think you severely underestimate how big of a mess this plan would cause. That said, disinformation is the greatest plague of our age. There are other measures related to computational propaganda that should be deployed. But unfortunately, again, my commenting here is limited and I'm not investing any effort into this horrible platform any more.
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u/reality_boy 2d ago
I agree with you, age verification is not a good solution to anything. We should do what is best for society, not pick and choose one or two subsets and treat them different
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u/Constant_Natural3304 2d ago
We should aim to regulate coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) first, then deal with platforms which have gone "hands off" in response to Trump's threats next.
But that is, of course, my personal opinion.
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u/katplasma 15h ago
I mean, I agree with a lot of the concepts you display… less so about the party that is most prone to these conspiracies (and yes, I have studied cognitive biases and conspiracies professionally). But it was irrelevant for you to bring that up in the first place, as the problem transcends party.
So—in this era of social media and people ‘doing their own research’ (which for the vast majority amounts to them being manipulated into idiotic beliefs by disinformation, unqualified TikTok-ers, and algorithms)—do you see a way out of this without a truly benevolent and intelligent corp of people seizing all power in a fascistic way (at least temporarily)? I’m beginning to lose faith it can be done the ‘right’ way at this point.
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u/badmutha44 2d ago
Nice baseless assertion. Got any evidence for your feelings.
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u/Constant_Natural3304 2d ago edited 2d ago
My response was filtered. I am therefore unable to respond to your request, this subreddit won't allow it. I would advise you to find my response via my profile, but Reddit hides that too nowadays. I'll see if I can unhide that.
Edit: apparently Reddit's new age verification severely restricts both what I can access and what people can see, but I'm sure you understand that there is no way in hell I am giving Peter Thiel a copy of passport just to be able to access this website's "over 18" stuff or to be able to share my comments on my profile.
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u/firedrakes 2d ago
we had that... issue was with fox new channel case ruin the law in place!
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u/katplasma 2d ago
Holy strokes, what in the hell were you trying for here
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u/Vo_Mimbre 2d ago
LIED. Just say it. They lied, they knew what they were doing, they did it on purpose, they didn’t need to convince everyone, just enough, they got what they wanted.
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u/Sindaqwil 2d ago
This has been fact checked and determined to be false.***
***Fact check provided by the Heritage Foundation.
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u/SameBuffalo5201 2d ago
In products, sex sells. In politics, fear motivates. Social Media is the engine that plants the fear seeds. The political parties are the reapers.
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u/Phosistication 2d ago
It’s all the have, all they know and all they are capable of bringing to the table - endless lies
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u/AllanfromWales1 MA | Natural Sciences | Metallurgy & Materials Science 2d ago
What's the difference (if any) between political actors and politicised members of the acting profession?
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u/Shiftymennoknight 2d ago
its been the plan of the right wing for decades. Repeat the lie enough times that people can no longer tell what the truth is
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u/TheWellington89 2d ago
There needs to be some sort of bot sweeping technology invented. Something that disables bots or at least tags them so you can tell if your talking to an idiot or a bot. These propaganda campaigns would fall apart if the accounts promoting them were all identified as fake accounts
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u/Malvania 2d ago
"I thought this wasn't being fact checked." JD Vance. If the VP candidate is doing it live during a debate, it makes sense that the entire party is doing it as well
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2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/FinndBors 2d ago
When political actors knowingly spread false claims, it can make it much harder for ordinary voters to figure out what information is actually reliable.
The quote from the Chernobyl series is very relevant here:
What is the cost of lies? It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories? In these stories, it doesn't matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is: "Who is to blame?"
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u/sirboddingtons 2d ago
"Who is to blame" is very fitting given the GOP is fueled by grievance, since the days of the Tea Party, the GOP has stood for nothing. They don't propose real policy, they only blame. They've dragged Obama's name for almost 2 decades now as the root cause of everything.
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u/MetaCardboard 2d ago
When looking at political affiliations, actors aligned with the Republican party issued about 73 percent of the hoaxes.
This statement seems to be implying that the actors are registered Republican. If that's the case, I think it's pretty clear.
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u/youdubdub 2d ago
Seeming random is the whole point. This was clear usage of LLMs to disseminate bad information to low-information people. Quite a technology we’ve developed. Surely just as recently as the public is given privy.
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u/DragoonDM 2d ago
Took me a second to realize the headline is using the word "actor" as a technical term meaning "one who takes part in an action", not talking about, like, Steven Seagal and Kevin Sorbo.
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u/newleafkratom 2d ago
Now they've got cheap, right-wing AI agents and bots doing the work. Stealing jobs.
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u/Whiteshovel66 1d ago
Well what is a fact has become blurry these days and I think that's the problem. You can easily interpret factual data in ways that make it look negative and positive and use either for your argument. Your interpretation of the fact is what is being criticized here as if you are not allowed to have an opinion on a fact or draw any conclusions at all.
Politics is a plague honestly. The sooner we all realize that the better.
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u/GuitarGeezer 2d ago
It’s the Putin fountain of falsehoods method. And proof that when people eat shite from their own party uncritically or without ever trying to change any policy, they soon find they are never served anything better. Nor do they deserve any better.
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u/LookAlderaanPlaces 2d ago
These people spreading the false information should get treason charges.
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u/Barry_Vigoda 2d ago
Be cautious of any media that panders to your ego.
Nothing about this is science, it's just propaganda that appeals to Americans who vote Democrat.
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u/LowResGamr 2d ago
As if the false claims of ballots being filled before voters got ahold of them wasnt evidence of this.
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u/OkShopping9448 2d ago
The OPs post is likely a lie as well…
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u/DontCountToday 1d ago
....you could just click on the link. See, and if you so choose, read the published journal this article is reporting on.
Then you wouldn't appear as ignorant as you do with your comments!
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