How to avoid drowning in a sea of disinformation

It’s been three days since we got ourselves a new candidate for president, and already the bullshit has piled up so high you’d have to climb a ladder to see over the top of it.

Right now, the MAGAs and the Monarchists are scrambling to find a coherent line of attack, so they’re throwing everything against the wall in the hope that some of it will eventually stick. 

We have seen this shitshow before. Remember how January 6 was a peaceful protest, a visit by curious tourists, a false flag operation by antifa, and an inside job by the ‘deep state,’ all within the space of 24 hours?

Give them points for creativity and sheer chutzpah, if nothing else.

So far, all they’ve been able to do is dredge up old rumors and innuendo and try to spackle them into something resembling a scandal. We’ve now heard that Kamala is a childless cat lady who loves coconut trees and wants to ban hamburgers from our diets, that despite a lifetime of public service (including four years inside the White House) she somehow lacks the experience for the job, that she's not really an American citizen (wrong), and that she has a weird laugh (maybe).

Judd Legum of Popular Information has a helpful fact-based guide to some of the other lies that are already being spread about the current vice president. Meanwhile, just for fun, here’s an old (but newly relevant) gem from Randy Rainbow: 

We have yet to see the waves of pure disinformation and AI-driven deep fakeyness that’s the next likely step in this campaign of attack. I’m sure it’s coming. So fasten your seatbelts, folks. It’s about to get bumpy. [1]

Resistance is necessary, arguing is futile

Your job and mine is to not take the bait (or debate). Refuting lies just spreads them over a larger surface area, and arguing with these assholes is exactly what they want you to do. I think we learned a long time ago that facts bounce off them like bullets off the chest of Godzilla.

ICYMI: We are all information warriors

The temptation to demonstrate the depths of your contempt for someone’s paucity of intellect – let alone their complete moral degeneracy, utter lack of humanity, and terrible spelling – is overwhelming. Believe me, I know. But there’s a 90 percent chance you’re arguing with a bot, a sockpuppet, or a professional troll. In other words, you’re doing their work for them. [2]

Here please allow me to quote David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo, who dedicated much of his daily newsletter yesterday to this very topic. The whole thing is worth a read, but the salient point is this: 

"The urge to rebut each attack whack-a-mole style may be well-intentioned, but it’s a fool’s errand. Taking on the task of confronting an endless supply of baseless attacks is to let your opponent run you in circles."

Stick to just the facts, ma’am

It’s vital you do not believe and/or spread any news gleaned from social media or obscure ‘news’ sites without verifying it first. One of my favorite fact-checking sites lately has been NewsGuard, which is doing a bang-up job reporting on mis- and disinformation and the emergence of political deep fakes. You can sign up for the NewsGuard Reality Check newsletter here.

Another newsletter worth subscribing to (which I’ve also mentioned before) is FrameLab. Written (mostly) by muckraking journalist Gil Duran, and based on the teachings of George Lakoff, professor emeritus of linguistics and philosophy at UC Berkeley (Go Bears!), FrameLab focuses on taking dubious or deceptive arguments and reframing them without reinforcing them.

You can use these linguistic techniques on friends and relatives who’ve gone over to the dark side but might yet be rescued, provided you frame your arguments in language and the larger values you all connect with. Like freedom, for example. Or democracy.

Today’s FrameLab essay is by LOLGOP newsletter author Jason Sattler, and it’s a banger. I highly recommend it.

Log off Xitter (and Facebook, too)

If you haven’t already left that hellscape formerly known as Twitter, now would be an excellent time to make the leap. You won’t be changing anyone’s minds there, you’ll just be spending your quality time with the dregs of humanity.

Per CNN:

A review by social media analytics firm PeakMetrics of nearly 175,000 posts on X between 6 and 7 pm ET on Sunday that mentioned Harris in relation to Biden’s announcement found that 8.3% of the posts used “racialized” language in referring to Harris, while 4.5% posts used “sexualized” language.

In the immortal words of Techdirt’s Mike Masnik, if two Nazis walk into your favorite bar and no one throws them out, it’s now a Nazi bar. 

Also in that CNN story:

On X, owner Elon Musk fanned an antisemitic conspiracy theory by replying to a photo of Harris and Alexander Soros, son of the billionaire megadonor George Soros, by suggesting that Harris would be a “puppet” of the Soros family.

Just in case you forgot for five minutes what a bigoted piece of spacetrash Elon Musk is, he happily steps in to remind us. [4]

ICYMI: Pay close attention to the technocrats behind the curtain

Facebook, for its part, is being very Facebooky again. First Zuck & Co restored the twice-impeached, coup-attempting, classified-secrets-stealing, 34X convicted felon back onto the platform without any guardrails. Then it decided to get rid of CrowdTangle, its free disinformation transparency tool, just in time for the presidential elections. The plan is to replace it with a much more limited tool starting on August 14. 

The Mozilla Foundation is petitioning Meta to retain CrowdTangle, at least through the end of the year. You can add your name to the petition here. Or just dump Facebook entirely. If your old high school sweetheart hasn’t already come back to you by now, it’s probably a lost cause. 

Stay on offense, stay on message

The secret to winning an information war is to keep the other side playing defense. The only way to achieve that is to be the aggressor. So if you absolutely must respond, do it in a way that puts them on the spot. 

For example: Every time someone brings up the letters D, E, & I, correct them by substituting the letters K, K, and K, and then ask, When did you first realize you were racist?

When they come at you with a misogynistic dog whistle: Did your mother have any children who lived? 

Or: Is it true that JD Vance had non-consensual sex with a couch? [3]

You might also remind them that Vance once compared his new mob boss running mate to Adolph Hitler, and not in a favorable way.

Forcing the other side to address questions they’d rather avoid (What is your stance on abortion rights? Are you on board with gutting social security and medicare? What are your thoughts on Project 2025?) is a good way to keep them backpedaling. 

Remember this rallying cry: We Are Not Going Back.

Right now it’s easy to swat away these silly lies and desperate attempts at slander. But these are early days. Eventually they will come up with something that convinces gullible media hacks desperate for drama to pretend it’s an issue of actual consequence, and they will try to start a drumbeat. Time to start getting ready for it now.

How are you planning to spend the next 104 days? Share your sanity preserving tips and tricks in the comments or email me: [email protected].

[1] But at least we’re finally off the ground. Right?

[2] Remember the movie War Games? (Yes, I’m friggin’ old.) The only winning strategy is to not play at all. 

[3] The notion that Vance had written about having marital relations with an inside-out latex glove trapped between two couch cushions was a Twitter hoax. But the fact that nearly 2 million people saw that Tweet and apparently believed it was true is all you really need to know about the man.

[4] I’m 98 percent certain there’s a brain worm stuck inside Elon’s skull, desperately looking for a way out.