Navigating Election-Year Disinformation and Conspiracies
As the United States, along with an unprecedented number of other nations, anticipates national elections this year, there’s a bogeyman hovering—the threat of erroneous information about the issues, candidates, and electoral processes involved.
A whole series of now-familiar controversies, rooted in skepticism about American institutions and powered by false or questionable information, have prepared the ground for these concerns: the assertions that Barack Obama was born in Kenya (aka “birtherism”); that vaccines are useless, harmful, and/or designed to implant microchips that allow technocrats to control the vaccinated; that the 2020 election was “stolen”; that political leaders are the paid agents of sinister puppet masters; that mainstream journalism and academic science are regularly faked to serve partisan ends; and countless other claims ranging from the exaggerated to the outright false.
Along with concern about how misinformation, offered and accepted in good faith, about nonexistent plots and false-flag operations may sway voters, there are worries about outright disinformation—bad actors behind the scenes generating lies and potentially using AI to do so. Oren Etzioni, an artificial intelligence expert and professor emeritus at the University of Washington, told the Associated Press that he expected “a tsunami of misinformation” as the election nears, with deepfakes a particular threat. “You could see a political candidate like President Biden being rushed to a hospital,” he said. “You could see a candidate saying things that he or she never actually said. You could see a run on the banks. You could see bombings and violence that never occurred.”
Carleton faculty and alumni who are experts on various aspects of political and politics-adjacent misinformation and its antidotes have been engaging with these issues for a while now, and although they acknowledge Etzioni’s concerns, they also have some solid suggestions for seeking and finding the truth as the election approaches—and for being aware of tendencies in ourselves that may make us susceptible to misinformation. These insights are rooted in their research and experience with political behavior, human psychology, the way narratives work, and what’s available to us to winnow truth from fakery.
Uncertainty, Anxiety, Loss of Control
Christina Farhart, associate professor of political science, is a student of complex misinformation. The author of “Conspiracy Theory Belief and Conspiratorial Thinking” in The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology (Cambridge University Press) and lead or co-author of many papers on political misinformation and related topics, she’s careful to distinguish the different types of questionable info in the political sphere. First of all, she says, there’s putting a political spin on legitimate information, which she identifies as good politics. “You want to spin information in a way that’s going to intrigue your base and draw attention to your issue or candidate,” she says. “But this kind of political framing can become dangerous if, say, the frame becomes racially coded or incorporates misinformation.”
As for misinformation, she says, it can be either innocent or intended to deceive—“anything from an old wives’ tale to bad road directions to erroneous information that’s politically motivated in order to antagonize or make a political rival look bad. So there’s a wide range.”
Disinformation, on the other hand, is always intended to deceive. The meaning of the word is fluid and open to debate; some scholars consider it to be a translation of the Russian name of a KGB department devoted to “black propaganda,” fake propaganda created to give the impression that it comes from enemies in order to discredit them. More recent definitions of the term in research literature have tended to simply equate it with deliberate lying or with propaganda. One thing that makes it distinctive, however, says Farhart, is that it usually proceeds from a source that is either official or made to seem so. “We generally see it as coming from people in positions of power or influence, and that’s why it can be so challenging to counter and so deeply politically charged,” she says.
Her definition of conspiracy theories is concise but comprehensive. “They encompass some form of allegation, regardless of real truth, that involves multiple coordinated, often powerful actors or influential forces that are secretly plotting to usurp political or economic power, violate established rights or vital secrets, or unlawfully alter government institutions,” she says. “And what can make conspiracy theories so hard to refute is that the very lack of evidence for them can strengthen them. It implies for the conspiracy-minded that there is some form of cover-up going on that’s integral to them.”
What can make conspiracy theories so hard to refute is that the very lack of evidence for them can strengthen them.
— Christina Farhart, associate professor of political science
Conspiracy theories can be attractive, she suggests, because human beings are uncomfortable with uncertainty, anxiety, and feelings of loss of control. The theories offer explanations for the unknown and uncontrollable, and in that sense they initially contribute to a kind of comforting sense-making. Her research has shown that people who experience “learned helplessness”—repeated feelings of loss of control, the sense that whatever they do, the political system will not see, hear, or respond to them—are prone to find answers in conspiratorial explanations.
“This is particularly true in the ‘perfect storm’ of uncertainty that we’re experiencing now,” she says. “Interestingly though, we also find that, over time, as people endorse more conspiratorial thinking, what ends up happening is that this process actually contributes to greater feelings of loss of control. So even though people start by seeking them out as coping mechanisms, the theories actually have downstream negative consequences for them.”
She has also found that conspiracy theories are often mobilized in the wake of political losses, and this accounts for something she and her colleagues have seen as they survey political attitudes. While conspiracy thinking tends to be more closely associated with the Right than the Left today, both Red and Blue are prone to it in about equal measure, depending on circumstances.
“The evidence that we have,” she says, “demonstrates that we’re all tempted to accept misinformation or conspiracy beliefs if they happen to appeal to a particular identity or value of ours. There is data that would suggest that conservatives might be slightly more prone to do so, given some personality factors that track with conservatism or Republican identity. But most studies show that context plays a much larger role.”
When Barack Obama was president, she notes, the Right was motivated to believe conspiracy theories in order to impugn his presidency and question his legitimacy. “But our work predicted that in 2016, after the election of Donald Trump, that dominance would flip, and Democrats and liberals would become more subject to misinformation,” she says. “Looking at nationally representative data, we did find that to be the case. In fact, even right after the 2016 election, while Obama was still in office, the endorsement of conspiracy theories by Democrats and liberals increased, and it decreased for Republicans and conservatives.”
One of Farhart’s colleagues in the quest to understand conspiracy theories and other forms of politically charged misinformation is R. Michael Alvarez ’86, professor of political and computational social science at Caltech. His research has focused on election integrity and on conspiracies and other falsehoods related to politically charged scientific issues, including climate change and the response to COVID-19.
“It’s clear,” he says, “that conspiratorial thought has lots of implications for people’s behavior, especially politically and socially. And it seems to have some significant implications for people’s willingness to trust what we do with science. A lot of the conspiracy theories that float around have to do with science.”
Distrust of science, he feels, bleeds into political mistrust because the call to “trust the science” has become a political argument. “To be honest, I’m a relatively skeptical person myself, being a scientist, a social scientist,” he says. “And I like the fact that people are willing to challenge us and ask us hard questions, but what is damaging today is that there is a lack of acceptance when scientists speak fact. Sometimes we’re not great about how we do that, but I worry about the deep reluctance now to believe scientists who are speaking fact.”
In 2023, the university’s Center for Science, Society, and Public Policy, which Alvarez co-directs, organized a remarkable conference: “Conspiratorial Thinking & Origins, Spread, and Consequences.” Fifteen scholars from around the world presented papers exploring a range of topics from the narrative forms of conspiracy theories to the dynamics of belief in them to the best ways to counter them.
The conference began with a presentation from a literary scholar, Elise Wang of Cal State-Fullerton, who discussed “blood libel”—the medieval belief that Jews ritually murdered Christian children. She argued that the seemingly legitimate forms in which the lie was presented when it was taken up by historical chroniclers and other authors—with visual images, citations of sources, and, overall, the language of objectivity—served as a template for later accounts of supposed conspiracies, with their obsessive marshaling of “facts” and their drawing of “logical” conclusions. At the same time, she noted, the conspiracy template is flexible, allowing true believers to interpret elements in their own way and get around logical inconsistencies.
What is damaging today is that there is a lack of acceptance when scientists speak fact.
— R. Michael Alvarez ’86, professor of political and computational social science at Caltech
Other participants pondered the psychology of conspiracy belief, distinguishing the rational elements in it—conspiracies have actually existed, and still do—from the irrational, and distinguishing conspiracy belief from clinical paranoia. One takeaway: conspiracists tend to have lower levels of anxiety and depression, and to be less isolated and better connected to social circles, than people suffering from paranoia—even if both groups feel persecuted and resist evidence refuting their beliefs.
The Hot-Cognition Hypothesis
Another contributor to the Caltech conference, Betsy Sinclair of Washington University in St. Louis, a former student of Alvarez’s, discussed her research into the tendency of people to adopt false beliefs if the beliefs preserve their partisan identity. It’s a theme familiar to Carleton’s Ryan Dawkins, an assistant professor of political science. A student of political psychology and electoral behavior, among other topics, Dawkins describes the through-line of his research as examining “how salient political identities shape the way people engage with the political world around them, how they think about themselves, how they think about others, and how they think about their participation in democracy, broadly defined.”
Given that orientation, it’s no surprise that Dawkins draws connections between group identity and the willingness to believe or disbelieve information.
“The way we think about the world is to create categories,” he says. “We look at a thing in our experience, like a cup, which has certain characteristics and qualities. We see other things that have the same characteristics, and we recognize them as cups, too. We do the same thing in our social world—create categories of people, and two of those categories are in-groups and out-groups.”
We tend to assign positive characteristics to our in-groups, those groups with which we identify or in which we claim membership, he says, and our group identities become an important source of our self-concept and self-esteem. “So when there’s negative information that challenges convictions we have about our in-group, and thus challenges our own self-concept, we become resistant to it and argue against it.”
This is what’s known as the hot-cognition hypothesis. Dawkins notes that hot cognition has both a confirmation bias and a disconfirmation bias—that is, we tend to seek out confirmatory information that proves that we’re right, and we’re also liable to counter-argue challenging information as a way to disconfirm it. “And it’s only a short step,” Dawkins says, “between that and uncritically endorsing incorrect information.”
Protecting Ourselves
Whether it’s misinformation, deliberate disinformation, or conspiracy theory, it will come at the 2024 voter in the form of statements from candidates and other partisans—likely ones made very emphatically—and our Carleton experts agree that to protect ourselves from falsehoods, we need to be source-conscious about those statements.
Farhart recommends checking the most significant things you hear or read not just with a trusted source, one that has a track record of reliability, but with multiple sources. “Be a critical consumer of information,” she says, “Be thoughtful about where the information is coming from. Has it been fact-checked?” It’s important that we extend that critical attention to statements from people on our side of the partisan divide too, she says. “Oftentimes, we engage in motivated reasoning, where we only seek out sources that confirm our prior beliefs or speak to identities that are important to us—including, of course, our political identity. If something feels ‘off,’ ask why it feels off.”
One of the hottest of hot-button issues as the election nears is bound to be election integrity, given the spurious allegations of fraud and the outright threats against poll workers we’ve seen in the last few years. Sarah Berlin ’12, director of civic information at the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Technology and Civic Life, works against mis- and disinformation in that sphere by leading the CTCL’s efforts to obtain accurate information about electoral processes and candidates’ identities and claims.
“It’s actually incredibly complicated to vote in the United States,” she says, “and the rules are different everywhere. The availability of information is different everywhere. Some people vote by mail, some people vote early, some people vote on election day. Elections at different levels happen at weird times, sometimes in sync with federal elections, sometimes not. To be able to make your voice heard on the issues you care about, to vote, you really need access to information.”
She says that most of the mis- or disinformation that she’s seen over the past few years has taken the form of falsehoods about the history, beliefs, and positions of specific candidates, as well as online accounts impersonating them. “The other category,” she says, “concerns voting, the election process, and election integrity—what kinds of voting are allowed, how votes are counted, who runs elections.”
Whether the issue is complexity as a source of confusion, or motivated misinformation/disinformation, the job of Berlin’s team is to collect electoral data directly from local and state officials at all levels, then put it into a standard format and offer it as datasets to entities ranging from Google to dedicated nonpartisan websites. (The other division of the CTCL helps officials troubleshoot the election process, anticipate and prepare for election-day problems, and communicate voting information to the public.)
Berlin recommends sourcing your information hyper-locally, both to understand for yourself how the franchise works and to be able to bring real knowledge to bear when discussing it with people who may be distrustful of the process.
Don’t trust social media. We’ve been saying that for decades, right? And I don’t know why we have to keep repeating it.
— R. Michael Alvarez ’86, professor of political and computational social science at Caltech
“Call your election office,” she says. “I’ve done that many times in the course of research, asking, ‘Hey, how does this work?’ or ‘How do you do that?’ There are folks there who can answer whatever question you have and a lot of them are also doing great work around proactively reducing the opacity of the election process. Another thing that I think is really underrated in understanding elections is going to your state or local election website and seeing what information is there.” She also recommends checking with nonpartisan nonprofits like Vote.org—with which the CTCL partners—and Democracy Works. “They do a lot of work around voting and election information including info about where to vote and how to vote,” she says.
Alvarez seconds Berlin. “When it comes to information about the actual process of voting, like getting your ballot, casting your ballot, returning your ballot,” he says, “my advice is: go directly to your state or county or municipal election official. I think that in this election cycle, they’re probably going to be very, very happy to take a phone call.”
And then he puts another suggestion bluntly: “I do not recommend that people go on X or Facebook or Instagram for their political information. Don’t trust social media. We’ve been saying that for decades, right? And I don’t know why we have to keep repeating it.”