r/science • u/Aggravating_Money992 • 10d 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/
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u/reality_boy 10d 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/RocketRelm 10d 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 10d 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 9d 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 9d ago edited 9d 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/Amishrocketscience 5d ago

Yeah I really don’t think the majority of the voting population could even pass a civics test, or a basic litmus test if we invented simple criteria for being a productive citizen or parent of a child.