PotP #8: Images and Memes as Vectors of Disinformation and Global Democratic Backsliding
Plus partisans actually helping each other out and a look at US voter's "enthusiasm" over octogenarian presidents.
Hello all—and happy Monday!
Last week, Morning Consult released a survey gauging people’s perceptions of different ways folks have been laid off. Here is a live look of my reaction to reading it.
I like to say that God is a novelist, but I’m feeling that this chapter has been particularly heavy-handed.
I’ve got 4 studies for you this week
A paper looking at disinformation propagated through images on Facebook
A short piece on partisans helping each other out (no, really)
A poll looking at voters’ perceptions of Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s age
A report showing declines in liberal democracy around the world
Plus a few nuggets I picked up this week.
1. Visual misinformation on Facebook | Published: Feb. 2023 | Journal of Communication
Findings:
A lot of ink has been spilled about the promulgation of fake news and disinformation since the 2016 election. Lots of people are concerned with how social media platforms can be hijacked by bad actors to spread falsehoods. However, despite the fact that the internet arguably exists for the promulgation of pictures1, there hasn't been a lot of research on the extent of disinformation encoded in static visual form. This paper by Yunkang Yang, Trevor Davis, and Matthew Hindman analyzed nearly 14 million Facebook posts from a near-complete sample of prominent US political groups and pages in the months before the 2020 US general election. They used image-oriented machine learning algorithms to identify images of US political figures and sampled 1,000 posts to investigate (using Snopes and Factcheck.org as references) the presence and prevalence of misinformation. They found that approximately 25% of images overall contained misinformation. However, there were large differences in the presence of misinformation by the presumed partisan alignment of the image poster: Nearly 40% of right-leaning images contained verified misinformation versus approximately 5% of left-leaning images. The research also found that their tended to be a lot of redundancy in themes and motifs of the images---as well as in the images themselves.
Commentary:
I’m so glad for this research and its scope is truly impressive. I’ve long thought that memes and images were terribly understudied in the context of political communications. If you go into the comment sections of Reddit, 9gag, iFunny, etc2, you'll see loads of people saying something to the effect of "I get my news through memes." This paper doesn't explicitly deal with those sites but, again, if you've been to any of them, you know that they're fairly incestuous on the content front. I do find the sheer scope of the partisan differences to be insane. But even allowing for a bias on the part of the fact checkers (the most obvious objection to this particular finding), do we really expect that it will fully account for this drastic gap? Plus, other research has found online misinformation to be more prevalent among right-leaning online groups (though far from non-existent on the left). So while I reserve some skepticism on the extent of the gap, I have very little doubt about the existence of a large asymmetry in general.
I'd love to see future research that looks to see how effective these visuals are at influencing belief and spreading disinformation---and which visuals are doing the most lifting for which subgroups. (For example: Are there differences in persuasiveness when shared by someone in one's friends' group versus when ingested directly from the page? Additionally, maybe some of the truly crazy stuff only directly influences folks who are already at the extremes but consistent exposure may normalize ostensibly less extreme statements, raising the effectiveness of other visuals for other folks). A lot of very important work being done (and to be done) in this space!
2. Despite party differences, Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly say they’ll help each other | Published: Feb. 21 | 3Streams
Findings:
It’s common for reports on US partisanship to report on the various ways that we disapprove of each other, are prejudiced towards each other, or are generally at each other’s throats. However, recent work leveraging the 2022 Collaborative Midterm Survey shows that this is not universally true. There are a variety of actions that people continue to take regardless of the other person’s partisan status. Researchers asked people if they were willing to perform a set of pro-social actions, randomly assigning the recipients of these actions to be either Republicans or Democrats. They found that people were largely very prosocial and generally did not change in this disposition when encountering someone of a different party:
The largest partisan difference emerged for the question that asked respondents how likely or unlikely they would be to encourage their child to be friendly to a new kid if they learned the parents were Democrats or Republicans. When the politics of the new kid’s parents matched the respondent’s politics, 92% said they would probably or definitely encourage their child to be friendly. When the politics of the new kid’s parents opposed the respondent’s politics, 86% still said the same. When we asked about calling 911 in an emergency, even these small differences vanished. Instead of looking to do harm, partisans were equally likely to say they would help those of the opposite party in an emergency.
Commentary:
These results are really important to talk about. I think folks have a tendency to picture US affective partisanship as being this state of constant battle with stark lines permanently seared into the earth. I think that findings disconfirming the most extreme takes are good. They remind us that we are capable of viewing each other through superordinate identities: Parents, fellow humans facing an emergency, etc. Venom need not be our default mode; and I feel that appeals to such identities (which have, in some—but not all—conditions been shown to reduce outgroup disdain) will be a necessary part of lowering the collective temperature. That said, we shouldn’t let the fact that this is a breath of fresh air detract from the reason why it’s so fresh: Partisan animosity (including violent animosity) is a big issue and is on the rise in the US.
I feel like some of the reason why these values are so high in this survey come from both a combination of social-desirability bias3, the fact that people generally feel more partisan disdain for party representatives rather than members of the mass public, and also from the fact that these situations are, like, aggressively non-partisan (car accident victim), they are leaning on either an explicit or presumed prior personal relationship, or they describe that people were already going to do the prosocial thing but then they learn that the subject of their charity was a dang dirty [insert partisan here]. So I think this research shows more that suddenly learning one’s partisanship will not deter people from a course of prosocial action they had previously committed to or are already generally precommitted to. That’s certainly good and important, but we (as in the readers; the authors do not do what I’m about to describe) need to be careful not to confuse it with evidence that the effects of widespread affective partisanship may not be so bad after all.
3. Poll: 68% of voters say Biden is 'too old for another term' — and more Democrats agree than disagree | Fielded: Feb. 23-27 | Yahoo!/YouGov
Results:
Joe Biden is the oldest person to both have been elected President and to have served as President. However, the person who he took that first title from was none other than Donald Trump.4 If Biden is reelected, he will begin his second term at age 82, which is the same age that Trump would be as he ended his second term should he become the GOP nominee and win the Presidency. A recent Yahoo! News and YouGov survey of about 1,500 people shows a lot of ambivalence towards an octogenarian Commander in Chief. 45% of respondents said that 80 would be “too old” to be President. 60% of Americans are very+somewhat concerned with President Biden’s “mental acuity” versus 53% who are concerned with Former-President Trump’s. This, of course, has a large partisan difference with Democrats being less concerned about Biden (although not unconcerned; 41%) than Trump (65%) and Republicans being less concerned about Trump (25%) than Biden (82%). 65% of US adults say Biden will be “too old” whereas 45% say the same for Trump. This too has partisan differences.
Commentary:
One thing that stands out to me is just the flagrant expressive partisan response. There’s a large number of Democrats apparently content with asserting that age is a bigger problem for the verifiably younger man than it is for the older one. As Natalie Jackson noted on Twitter: This could be that both party’s respondents were swapping out the age question with one about age-correlated health decline. To build off of that, I think many are probably swapping it out with age-correlated mental/cognitive health decline. that is a fairly popular talking points among both groups. As mentioned above, they did ask a question on mental acuity explicitly; we do see some differences between the two measures but not a whole heckuva lot.
While I think the article is a smidge bullish on how it frames the impact of Biden’s age on people’s decisions, I think it likely will have an impact. I expect that this impact will be moderated by who Biden winds up facing (Desantis and Haley are far, far more articulate than Trump and come with far less baggage) as well as Biden’s performance in high-profile speaking events. Performing poorly at such events may carry a persuasive effect for Republican leaners and independents. I doubt it will be a particularly large effect as a percent of the vote but you don’t need particularly large effects in tight contests—especially if said effects were to be more geographically concentrated in the more critical states.
4. Democracy Report 2023: Defiance in the Face of Autocratization | Published: March, 2023 | V-Dem Institute
Findings:
Every year, the V-Dem (“Variations of Democracy”) Institute publishes an annual report looking at the global scope of democracy, anocracy, and authoritarianism in the world. The institute uses multiple experts and multiple measures to get at broad but important concepts as liberalism, freedom, and autocracy and compare where countries stand today compared to previous years. Unfortunately, the report doesn’t come packed with a whole lot of good news. The 1970s-early 1990s saw a massive upswing in the number of global democracies. We are now on a very large downswing. The report shows that the number of democracies around the world has reverted back to levels seen in 1986. Twice as many people (2.2 billion) live in “closed autocracies” as in “liberal democracies” (1.1 billion); nearly 3/4ths of the world’s population lives in either a fully closed or electoral autocracy—and autocracies are becoming less economically dependent on democracies. Various freedoms (media, expression, elections, civil society) are eroding in dozens of countries whereas erosion was only visible in a handful a decade ago. 42 countries are moving in a more autocratic direction. The most common things autocrats (and autocratizing agents) engage with are: repression of media and civil society organizations, targeting and repression of academics, reductions in cultural freedom and freedom of discussion.
Commentary:
V-Dem is one of several organizations doing incredibly good, rigorous work in this section of the comparative/global politics research space. Unfortunately, just about all of them seem to be sharing the same substantive conclusion: This is a very rocky time for liberal democracy in the world. A lot of folks who have dedicated their careers to understanding all the warning signs of democratic backsliding and authoritarian advancement have been ringing the alarm bells.5 As I’ve mentioned in a video on how COVID restrictions may accelerate authoritarian trends in certain contexts, most democracies do not end in a single violent spectacle but are steadily hollowed out through ostensibly legal means. This means that we as citizens in still-liberal democracies not only have to be vigilant, we have to be active in doing our part. And, at the literal absolute minimum, that means voting; but, specifically, voting carefully. Researching candidates prior to voting—and listening to the consensus of experts when they say “this person has been doing a lot of troubling things, maybe it’s best we don’t give them more power.” Remember, evil wins when good folks do nothing.
A couple more nuggets before you go
Came across a few state-level polls that covered some interesting (and partially overlapping) policy issues: Here’s Missouri (gun control, school safety, childcare, teaching history), Texas (school safety, gun laws, marijuana & gambling), and New York (climate, cigarette tax, film tax credit).
This Pew Research center project looking at how much of an “advancement” particular AI technologies (writing news articles, producing drought resistant crops, predicting visual images from keywords, etc) are. Interestingly, only 44% of people said that “writing news articles” is an advance compared to 70% for producing visual images—which makes me wonder whether people mistook “an advance” in the prompt as “a positive advance.” (Or if these folks happen to all be aware that AI has been helping bite-sized news reports for a minute). Would have been really cool to combine this with people’s normative stances like that.
Average prices for the tooth fairy are up 16% YOY according to the Original Tooth Fairy Poll by Delta Dental. The average haul in 2022 is $6.23. I wish that the median were reported because there’s got to be some high hauls biasing this average—either that or I’m gonna have to take on extra work just to afford the financial onslaught that my toddler’s mouth will incur in the coming years…
Mostly memes, porn, and animal pictures at this point.
And I would strongly recommend doing so with some hazmat suits and with r/eyebleach prepped in a separate tab.
Both in the sense that people will tend to report the more socially desirable thing as their belief and/or intended action—but also in that people who answer surveys may genuinely tend towards more prosocial thoughts and actions anyways.
In case you were wondering: The second title, oldest serving President, used to belong to Ronald Reagan. He ended his tenure in office at age 77. Joe Biden entered at 78.
If you’re interested in learning more but also getting absolutely depressed and anxious as fuck about the imminent future of democracy at home and abroad: How Democracies Die, The Dictator’s Handbook, and How Civil Wars Start are great places to start.