Help, help! We're being framed.

You may have seen the BBC report that deep fake images of Trump surrounded by admiring Black people have been making the rounds on social media. (And if not, Stephen Colbert has a funny take on it.)

These fakes are not being generated by the Trump campaign. A batch of them were created by a conservative talk radio show host in Florida, which he then shared to his 1 million+ followers on Facebook. [1]

This is the real threat from deep fakes, by the way. It's not the official campaigns ginning up fakes to make their guy look good and the other guy look bad. It's the millions of amateurs (and hostile nation states) who will be flooding the Internet with so much of this bullshit that nobody knows what is real any more.

These fakes are generally not hard to spot. There's a dude with three arms, for example. That and the fact that the writing on the hats and shirts appears to be in Martian.

I hesitate to reprint any of the other fake images. Even though you and I know they are fake (and ludicrous), and there's big red labels on them screaming "FALSE!" and "AI generated," they still have an impact on our brains. They reframe our thinking in subtle ways we cannot control.

As always, I am indebted to the work of George Lakoff and his colleagues at The Frame Lab for putting this in clear and simple terms. [2] Like this post from last month:

The goal of political framing is to create frames (negative or positive) around political issues. These frames are powerful because they create political belief and ideology, and become physical parts of the brain.... Once an issue is framed in your brain, it can become nearly impossible to change. It becomes part of your brain’s neurocircuitry.

Poll taxes

Unlike with deep fakes, framing doesn't have to be intentional to have a devastating effect. For example: How many news polls have we now seen asking if both of our leading presidential candidates are too old? A dozen? Two dozen? Like this Associated Press poll that appeared yesterday. [3]

The paragraph appearing directly below that chart is very revealing.

"People’s views of Biden’s memory and acuity have soured since January 2022, when about half of those polled expressed similar concerns. (That survey didn’t ask a similar question about Trump.)"

In other words, "Joe is old" has been part of that frame for a long time. "Donald is demented" is a new addition.

This is not a grand conspiracy on the part of the media to install a permanent oligarchy [4]. It's garden variety lazy lemmings behavior you see among journalists all the time. Every story falls into a well established narrative. In other words, the story comes pre-framed; just add words and stir.

How people respond to polls like this depends hugely on how the questions are framed. It starts with an assumption (both candidates are verging on senility) and then asks if people agree. It doesn't ask open ended questions like, "What do you think of Joe/Don's mental capacity? Have you seen signs of dementia? Can you provide examples?"

Just today, Pew Research published a story about how polls that use opt-in sampling (ie, respondents are self selected, not chosen at random) are wildly unrepresentative of reality. Here's a fun excerpt:

For example, in a February 2022 survey experiment, we asked opt-in respondents if they were licensed to operate a class SSGN (nuclear) submarine. In the opt-in survey, 12% of adults under 30 claimed this qualification, significantly higher than the share among older respondents. In reality, the share of Americans with this type of submarine license rounds to 0%.

A less fun excerpt: A December 2023 poll showed that 20% of US adults under 30 agree with the statement, "The Holocaust is a myth."

Have you noticed any major news organizations asking about both candidates' moral capacity? Do you think that might change the framing a little bit?

The Gray Lady has lost its mind

And now, a message from the New York Times. This is a long story in which two reporters talk to Biden supporters in Pennsylvania. Here's the headline.

Superfans?

SUPERFANS?!!!!

I have to say, I really lost my mind over this headline.

I think I know what's going on with this story. The Times has gotten a lot of well-deserved criticism and more than a little mockery for its many many profiles of disgruntled Trump voters sitting in a diner in Bumfork, Idaho, trying to understand what they are thinking (as if rational thought has anything to do with it).

So it decided, finally, to offer the same treatment for Biden voters. Fair enough. But that headline? Christ on a cracker.

It frames Biden supporters as their own form of cult — you know, just like the ones on the other side who walk around wearing red hats and carrying misspelled signs?

In paragraph 13, after we've heard from three septegenarians and their 16-year-old cats, we get to actual facts as to why these people might have good reasons to support Old Joe.

"Mr. Biden’s superfans say he deserves more credit for a substantive first-term record. Passing an infrastructure bill. Canceling some student loan debt. Protecting the environment with a sweeping climate measure. Capping the cost of insulin and other drugs. Supporting unions and abortion rights. Putting the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. Backing Ukraine and navigating international crises with his deep foreign policy experience.

But to the Times, we're all just Swifties with a thing for old guys who like to eat ice cream and say "malarky" a lot.

I think Andy Borowitz nailed it.

The point of my screed: We are all susceptible to framing, so we need to be especially careful in how we respond. Don't accept someone else's framing of an issue. Don't spread that framing to places where it can infect others. And don't answer push polls that ask stupid questions.

As the old saying goes, Don’t believe everything you think. You may not remember how those thoughts got in there.

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[1] Decades from now, if any there are any historians still around, they'll be able to trace the collapse of democracy to conservative talk radio hosts in Florida, and one in particular.

[2] Also hat tip as always to faithful reader NatHB.

[3] The methodology for how that poll was conducted is telling. It recruited panels of Americans based on responses to US mail and telephone entreaties and then provided "enhanced sample representation of hard-to-reach rural households." When is the last time you responded to a snail mail questionnaire or a random phone call? Who are these people?

[4] Well, not all the media. I can think of a few wanna-be oligarchs running multi-billion-dollar media companies.