So What Is Counterdisinformation, Anyway?
I swear to you that I did not just make this up.
Hi friends and frenemies! Yr friendly neighborhood debunker has been down in the Shitposting Mines for too long and forgot to define some of the terms she likes to fling around like a pissed-off bonobo for everybody’s reading pleasure, and since the mainstream political reporters are doing their usual predictable bullshit, it feels like a very good time to write this.
Today we’re going to be talking about counterdisinformation.
This is a real concept that I promise you I did not just make up! Just because it feels great to watch the cry-bullies melting down in public about their couch-loving proclivities doesn’t mean that this also isn’t a very good thing to be doing! Please keep doing it! For America!
Okay, so here’s the deal with counterdisinformation and why I use that term separately from “fact-checking” or even “debunking,” which is a term which I use to describe that aspect of my work as much as possible because it sounds cool as hell, way better than “fact-checking,” which just sounds like minimum wage and shitty hours to me, a former fact-checker!
We have already established the difference between misinformation (bad but unintentional information that is the result of some kind of mistake) and disinformation (deliberate lies used to mislead the public and institute bad policy). Misinformation can be turned into disinformation, but they’re still two different animals, and it’s also why little blood vessels burst in my eyes when some talking head confidently uses those two terms interchangeably.
IT WAS HERE!
Now let’s talk counterdisinformation. Like I said, it’s not the same thing as fact-checking and debunking, although it’s naturally related. And don’t get me wrong, those are extremely important to be doing too, when you’re fighting down in the brainwormed trenches of an ongoing information war. Keeping an eye on the truth and making sure it’s accessible is the absolute baseline for people trying to preserve a democracy.
But just supplying vetted facts and hoping for the best isn’t enough, no matter how satisfying it might be to correct random mistakes on the internet, especially if you’re in an election year and major news organizations have run out all the debunkers and fact-checkers. Folks, there’s a lot of roadkill littering the ol’ information superhighway right now!
But also, this has limited utility because disinformation purveyors don’t care that much about getting debunked, because for one thing, it takes a long time.
Here’s an example. Once you’ve gotten to explaining why “Taylor Swift drinks blood” is an antisemitic trope that has been applied to her by bad actors in order to tar her as a crypto-Jew, which plays into other antisemitic tropes that were popularized at the turn of the 20th century by a fabricated text called the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and oh yeah, you don’t need to actually be Jewish in order to be swept up in antisemitic tropes and here’s why … the narrative has already made it to TikTok and YouTube and like fifty different dipshits have made podcasts talking about how they totally saw it happen, you guys, she did it right there on stage, it was in this little club she performed at before she was popular, you wouldn’t have heard of it, et cetera.
(Taylor Swift is a successful and beautiful white lady who is not a white supremacist and who has also said some mildly political things to her fans, like “voting is good,” so naturally the worst people on the planet are trying to go after her.)
For another thing, honestly, fact-checking is boring as shit to outside observers. It’s dry, it’s dull, it’s full of details and cross-references. Who gives a shit about a half-hour lecture on the historical associations of antisemitic conspiracy theories, except for people like me with lots and lots of time to write columns because I never get invited to parties any more for some reason?
More importantly, who has the time to explain to everyone individually point by point that the thing a bunch of high-profile turds are chanting in unison is bad and wrong while you’re also trying to stop some shitbag official from signing a bill mandating that everyone named Taylor should be put into camps?
And therein lies the issue, because if you wait long enough and dig deep enough you’ll find that 99.999 percent of the time, the rumors about Taylor Swift originated with someone who wanted to put all Taylors into camps to begin with.
Which brings me to a secondary effect to debunking. If you are explaining why people are spreading absolutely batshit sounding narratives and what they are trying to accomplish with them, you end up sounding batshit too! Then random people start to ask you very pointedly if you’re keeping up on your therapy appointments or whether you have taken any time off recently, and getting mad at them does nothing to help! Ask me how I know!
It can work, but it’s a mighty effort with not a huge payoff. Enter counterdisinformation, the fun weird aunt of fighting weaponized narratives.
If you want to fight this narrative mess and are having a hard time with the fact-checks, let yourself off the hook. You don’t need to educate everyone. Remember, people don’t believe disinformation because they are stupid, or uneducated, or misled. They believe that shit because they want to, because something in them wants it to be real. They either haven’t done the work on their own emotional triggers, or they’re power-hungry shit-mouths, or some hideous combination of both. What they’re responding to emotionally is essentially a narrative — a story — and that story can be interrupted.
In practice, this can look like all sorts of things, from turning out by the thousands to intimidate a murderous fascist mob straight back under their rocks, to a well-timed interruption (yr friendly neighborhood debunker is particularly fond of loud farting noises, fyi) when some bully is on a stage, to a meme with such incredible staying power that it’s become shorthand for just how weird (derogatory) these little fash freaks are. It’s just a way to derail whatever narrative they’re trying to build up, and then laughing as it crashes and burns.
The important things to remember if you want to do a counterdisinformation are:
Don’t let the asshole liars set the topics or the terms of debate. If they’re talking about pedo groomer Demonrats, then don’t say “but ACTUALLY, that’s not true because #NotAllDemonrats.” That just gives them more fodder. Remember, you can’t prove a negative! Don’t bother to stay on topic. That’s what they want!
Try this instead: Explain to them that they are weird and they smell weird, probably from all the musty couches they fuck, like the fucking weirdos they are. Treat them like the bully gets treated at the end of a 1980s high school movie. That’s what they deserve!
Don’t let the tone police get to you. Ignore the civility scolds, or better yet, make fun of them, too. If their preferred way of going about things worked, we wouldn’t have been subjected to the last ten years of fascist violence and lies. Remember the Red Hen “civility” bullshit in 2018? Hey, what happened after that? Anyone remember? Did all the far right pieces of shit apologize and hug it out with everyone else? Of course not! They doubled right the fuck down! Fuck these people!
Try this instead: Ignore those dipshits and be as irreverent as you can. If far-right creeps want memetic warfare, then let’s make those rotten little shits regret it.
Don’t punch down. Don’t play in to what the disinfo purveyors are doing and convince yourselves that circulating disinformation about them is a great idea. And don’t call them shitty racist or antisemitic or misogynist or ableist names. Remember, that sort of shit only exists to take away the rights of others. Only weird fascists want to do that! There’s so much other shit to make fun of them for, like their malformed, disgusting ideas.
Try this instead: Truthfully point out how weird and abnormal they are and make fun of them, also truthfully, when they cry about it. It’s hilarious when they cry! Make it really sting! Wedgies and swirlies are also acceptable, but only if you get them on video and send them to me immediately. (My lawyers have advised to me to tell you that violence solves nothing.)
What you need most of all is to interrupt their joyless narratives and give everyone a better, funnier story. You don’t have to stay on the topics they set! You don’t owe them anything! Fuck them!
Don’t worry about bad actors calling you partisan. They’re always going to call you partisan, no matter how much you try not to be.
“Countering disinformation is not always apolitical,” as the good folks over at the Carnegie Endowment put it earlier this year, when they put out a well-researched paper about countering this threat that absolutely no news organization paid attention to because they were too busy firing all their fact-checkers.
“Those working to reduce the spread and impact of disinformation often see themselves as disinterested experts and technocrats—operating above the fray of political debate, neither seeking nor exercising political power.”
It’s impossible to fight anything this way, because then you’re taking a bunch of shithead liars seriously. And why would you take a bunch of misogynists, racists, and other assorted bigots seriously? Who gives a shit what a bunch of Nazis think about anything? They’re fucking Nazis!
They will threaten violence. They may enact violence. That’s what they do. I’m not trying to downplay that. But here’s the thing, they were going to do that anyway. The global far Right are democracy’s domestic abusers.
That’s kind of it. There isn’t a magic formula for counterdisinformation, although it is possible to reverse engineer some of it if you like reading papers. It’s just this: Talk shit to the people who are trying to take away our rights, make fun of them in public, because so much of their power depends on tapping just the right emotions.
These counterdisinformation techniques have been used before. I didn’t make these up, either. In the 1930s, another decade punctuated by disinformation, Nazis — like actual straight-up Nazis from Germany — tried to take over Hollywood studios so that they could use the film industry to pump out their rotten propaganda. They were eventually exposed and mostly run out by a group of committed volunteer spies and counterpropagandists who gave talks, held events, and put out literature about resisting disinformation and propaganda.
(Image courtesy In Our Own Backyard exhibit, CSUN.)
Dorothy Parker was part of this effort. So was Eddie Cantor. You can read more about it and what they did here.
Disinformation is a major, serious issue that aims to leverage and corrupt one of the most fundamental ways that humans understand and come to terms with the world around us. The global far Right has been trying to use the internet, which despite its ubiquity is still a very new communications technology, to co-opt all of the stories that make up a society: what we tell ourselves about who we are and about who all the people we know are, what the world is about and what we want the world to be. Stories are what give us the ability to create. That is what the global far Right wants to take from us. They want to warp our stories and twist them around in order to affect how we react to issues at scale, to harness and destroy the future that we are all in the process of creating together.
That’s why we need better stories. It’s why we need to fight this fascist threat with everything we have before it embeds itself into our politics for the long haul. That means we need to implement every single one of the recommendations made by experts, from better moderation to properly funded independent journalism to protecting freedom of speech across the board. It means holding leaders and public figures who openly lie to account and protecting vulnerable voices, too.
That’s what we need. That’s not what we’ve got. We currently have an anemic press filled with journalists untrained in the art of spotting weaponized narratives (and in an election year!), and some truly awful people with way more money and power than anybody should have dicking around in our all-important communications networks just as climate catastrophes are really about to get going in the United States.
So until we have all the tools we need, we’re going to have to do our best to fight this weaponized unreality by doing what we do best, ganging up on weird far-right freak shows and mocking them with all we’ve got, for truth and justice and the American way, whatever that is these days.
Maybe if we all keep up the good work, we’ll get a chance to find out!
Also you can pay Wonkette to keep up the good work for you. You’re welcome.
I think there is fundamentally a generational divide underpinning the tone police. Those who came of age in the Democratic party’s many failures from roughly 68-92 have it fundamentally tattooed on their dna that one must always give credence to right wing points of view and that one can never apologize fast enough for the liberals. Wheras, speaking only for a middle aged 45 year old, I’ve only seen this country go further down the shitter with Reagan’s grandchildren while the Republican Party has red pilled itself into such a reactionary lunacy that the John birch society would be ashamed.
No Democrat under the age of 45 wants a message of “we must RESPECT the purity of Donald Trump’s view point”. We want to hear “eff these weird freaks”
Blessed the party has started to notice
Interrupting their stories with better stories is just what I was writing about a few weeks ago:
https://pervertjustice.substack.com/p/capitalist-media-tells-what-sells
Interestingly, I wrote about telling better, more compelling stories about ourselves that counter disinformation by redefining ourselves using our own words and actions and lives, while Binkowski is talking about telling stories about the people selling the disinformation about us to redefine them as weak, sad poop.
These seem like entirely complimentary strategies to me