Navigating information overload

Often, when I travel through zones of intense information conflict, like in east Ukraine or in America, which is very similar to east Ukraine in some ways, I hear people say the same things: "We don’t understand what’s true or false anymore. We’re surrounded by this kind of deluge of information, disinformation, misinformation. We feel everybody’s biased. We feel everyone has an agenda. So, we just have to kind of follow our emotions, our gut instincts, to guide our way through."

The Brexit campaign in the UK was a campaign all about defining a new idea of the people, the real people as opposed to the evil global elites. This new “people” was completely different from the political factions of the past: They were from both sides of the aisle, left and right, they were from the working class and the aristocracy. This idea of the people had nothing to do with old political definitions. We know a little bit about the campaign that was run now because the people who ran it have given interviews and have left some digital evidence as well. They would precisely target little micro-groups.

For example, one of the most successful ads they did was about animal rights, which is a very important issue that people care a lot about but has nothing to do with being inside or outside the EU. Their aim was to tie this thing that people really cared about with the Brexit vote. So, you target people who care about animal rights and you say: ‘Did you know the EU is cruel to animals?’ And they put out a lot of ads showing that the EU supports bullfighting, for example. The man who ran the campaign told me that was the most effective ad they had done: it was the ad that actually got people to vote. So it’s a very strange world, where you have these bundles of emotion that you try to throw and unite people around, and then within that, a very targeted micro-message.

Today, we live in a world where you have political elites who are driving this divisive process. These elites are trying to foist what’s known as a “culture war” onto the population. These are political campaigns whose aim is to divide people into patriots and globalists, into “us and them”, “the people, the non-people”. At the London School of Economics, we’ve monitored a few of these campaigns and we’ve found that even though the campaigns are driven top down, there is this non-stop propaganda saying that this is the essential divide of the country. According to this propaganda, this is how we should understand the world around us when actually that doesn’t have very much correlation in the real world. People don’t actually divide into these groups. You tend to get fanatical little groups on the fringes, but actually most people are quite nuanced. Most people want to talk to what is meant to be the “other side”. Most people have quite nuanced beliefs on the core issues around what’s known as the “culture war”: abortion, gun rights. Talking about America, great data came out recently which showed that most people are kind of in the middle about immigration, and most people are kind of in the middle about abortion, and most people are kind of in the middle about the environment. So, this is very much an elite-driven process which is intended to create these definitions in order to achieve certain political goals, and we are seeing this very clearly right now.

Today in the US, there is an objective policy disaster happening around Coronavirus – and Coronavirus does not care if you are left, right, pink, yellow, Black Lives Matter or alt-right. It really doesn’t. In order to distract from what is an objective public policy catastrophe, certain powers, most notably the White House, but others as well, are trying to distract us to talk about a supposed essential culture war between a dangerous neo-communist left trying to spread its political correctness on the good people of Middle America.

Looking at the propaganda is horrific. It’s so obvious how it’s created and how they try to divide people. It’s obvious how they try to set up binaries. But I’m always relieved when I look at the data because the numbers show that people don’t quite fall for it. People are much more complicated and nuanced because life doesn’t fall into binaries. There are no simplistic culture wars. However, there is one factor which I think is really helping the people create this crass style of propaganda: the emotional and cognitive logic of social media.

We can complain about the old media system – there is so much wrong with it – but at least in that system, when you pick up something like The Daily Mail, which is a right-wing newspaper in England, you actually still, within The Daily Mail, get a large spread of opinion because it is meant to be a tent for the whole of the right wing. Nowadays, if your interest is immigration, you will just see content about immigration. It’s like reading one page of the newspaper over and over. So that’s two factors. And I think they’re really contributing to the kind of mental patterns and the emotional patterns which dovetail with the culture war pursuits of the propagandists.