I love Twitter (@RyanBleek – although you’ll notice I’m much more of a consumer than a producer). It’s probably the website that I frequent the most. It puts all kinds of interesting information in front of me that I otherwise would have missed. Yet the efficiency with which Twitter disseminates information has an obvious downside: misinformation is just as easily spread. All it takes, literally, is a click of a button.
Recently the following re-tweet passed through my Twitter feed: “RT Debt increase by presidents: Reagan 186%, Bush 54%, Clinton 41%, Bush II 72%, Obama 23%. Source: Congressional Budget Office.” There are three major problems with this statement. The first is that it isn’t clear why we should measure the offensiveness of debt increases in this manner. (“Yes, honey, it’s true that I added $10,000 to the credit card, but you must understand that relative to the debt we already had, this is actually less than the debt we added before.”) Second, it’s just flat-out untrue. Obama has increased the debt by 38% since he took office. Calculate it for yourself here. Obviously, at one point in time the figure was at 23%, but that’s far enough back and it is a significant enough difference that it is more deceitful than mistaken to make such an assertion today.
Yet the more interesting way that this tweet is misleading is that it implicitly purports to be making a meaningful comparison, which it definitely is not. Why? Because Obama’s increase in the debt has occurred in just 31 months compared to the 96 months for the Bush and Clinton increases. In fact, through August 21 of their third years in office, the national debt increased by 18% under Clinton, 18% under Bush II, and 38% under Obama (I was unable to calculate Bush I and Reagan). This is a rather obvious (and inarguable) objection to raise to the aforementioned tweet, and that’s what makes it interesting.
If you google the tweet, you will find that it has been re-tweeted and blogged many, many times. It’s hard to measure precisely how many, but it’s fair to say it’s at least in the thousands. I don’t believe that all the people who were a party to the tweet’s dissemination were simply too stupid to comprehend why it is a blatantly unfair and misleading comparison to make (setting aside its falsehood). No, I think they just really, really wanted to believe it was true, and that made them blind to the reasons why they should’ve questioned it.
That’s what I find interesting. Madison Avenue and campaign managers have long known that if you repeat something often enough it becomes true. It used to be that only a relatively small number of people/organizations had the power to repeat propaganda to massive numbers of people. Now, it’s just a matter of finding something that a large number of people want to believe is true (Obama increased the debt at a much smaller rate than his evil Republican predecessors), giving them just a hint of a reason to believe it’s true (claiming that your source is the C.B.O.), and then tweeting it out and waiting for it to be re-tweeted (or should I say ‘parroted’). Thereafter, anyone googling the increase of the national debt under previous presidents will be directed to a thousand websites proclaiming the truth of a lie.
The internet lets confirmation bias run rampant in choice of “news” media. You follow the people who support your worldview on Twitter. You read their blogs. You watch their videos.
I think one of the big problems in our political process is that reality has become subjective with the splintering of media sources in the internet age. Its not just that there are differences in principles and philosophies; people only see what confirms their values. The sides of the spectrum can’t even agree on what is happening. There is no factual common ground to start from.
Given the amount of tools in our political system to prevent making policy, I’m not sure how our government can overcome this problem and prevent gridlocks like we saw with the debt ceiling. Ultimately, I think there are too many views under one roof to govern effectively.
I agree. In fact, I originally was going to write this post specifically about confirmation bias and why it makes me much less engaged with politics than I used to be. It seems like most people are far more interested in winning an argument rather than diligently searching for what’s true. But I think even that’s too simplistic. I think the truth is so often really, really complex and difficult to sort out and so it’s much less intellectually exhausting to pick a side and interpret everything as confirmation. I try and purposefully expose myself to multiple viewpoints, but I’m certainly not above the temptations of confirmation bias.