One Thing the Right Does Better Online: Spurious Internet Rumours

by Daniel De Groot [courtesy of Open Left - Front Page]

McClatchy does some digging into the source of those "Obama is a secret muslim" emails we all love so much:

One practitioner in Virginia, who hates Obama like a dog hates cats, led a reporter through his efforts. Because the man is a retired clandestine CIA officer, identifying him could endanger officers or operations that remain classified, so McClatchy will not reveal his name.

In late 2006, convinced that an Obama presidency would be disastrous for America, he decided to start an anti-Obama operation. He combed the public record on Obama. He used a couple of allies and informants - half-jokingly dubbing his group "The Crusaders" - to learn about Obama's background, especially his Africa connection and how he came to be the editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Ok, that's pretty crazy already, and it gets better:

He wound up posting some of it on a blog - and where it went from there in the vast world of cyberspace is anybody's guess.

But a few months after the man began his work, the allegation that Obama was educated in a madrassa appeared in an anonymous article in Insight Magazine, an online publication of the Unification Church, in January 2007. It also claimed that Clinton operatives had dug up the information. The article was cited by several conservative commentators, including on Fox News, before it was debunked.

Well I'm shocked to find Revernd Moon and Fox News working together to create this crap.  What's the word I'm looking for?  Oh yeah, utterly predictable.  So let's put some thought into this subject for a second.
So a few comments on this:

1. Cognitive surplus at work.  Unfortunately not all applications of the cognitive surplus are as positive as Wikipedia.  Give people destructive things to do with their free internet time, and they will too.  Perhaps this is more motivation to provide productive outlets in the old "idle hands are the devil's workshop" kind of cliché way.

2. This is being done on purpose, in an organized fashion.  Yes, some email forwards are just college pranksters and insane cranks with no discernible political agenda, but in the world of viral marketing and whisper campaigns, someone somewhere is cooking these things up and practising getting good at having them reach critical mass (where they are getting forwarded enough to stay alive indefinitely).

3. This stuff matters.  There is ample psychological research into the effects of negative messaging.  As much as people claim to hate it, it works and there are solid psychological and cognitive function reasons for this.  I'll point to this paper (abstract only) which claims to show that if you hear something negative about a person (that you either believe or find at least plausible), and then later hear convincing proof you believe that shows the negative information was false, you still retain some residual negative impression about the person.  I don't have access to the paper so I can't vouch for its quality but the conclusion would explain a lot.

This just all goes to say, don't laugh this stuff off.  You won't fall for some email claiming Obama voted to lower the age of consent to 12 or that he was accused of rape in college or whatever nonsense they'll make up, but some people will, and even if they later learn it's false, some residual negative impact of the initial message remains.

The McClatchy article makes a couple good points on this too (it is a really good article).  I won't quote them since I'm already at the fair use limit here, but they point out that part of why email forwards work is that you are getting the information from someone you trust.  Of course, that person likely didn't put a lot of thought into the matter, and is likely acting in what Richard Dawkins might describe in terms of Memes, but on a psychological level this is an email from your friend, even though s/he didn't write it.  There's a layer of sceptical shielding that is put down in your head even as you open it.  

The other thing they discuss toward the end is that the "best" ones (that spread most successfully) are the ones written to say things you are prepared to believe.  "Meretricious" makes for a solid email forward it seems.

4. The right does far more of this.  Which is really a point of pride that few liberals go around inventing bullshit lies about conservatives to defeat them electorally, but it remains a problem for us to address nonetheless.  Just browse the archives of Urban Legend's category pages on the Clintons, Obama and then compare that to the meagre "list" (if two items is a list) of emails about McCain.   Of the two items, one is actually positive.  The items about the Democrats tend to be negative, and overwhelmingly false.  

My own subjective experience is that I can count the number of progressively themed email forwards I have gotten over the years on one hand, and am regularly sent conservative ones.  

So I don't have a great answer for this, just that it is a problem and we should put more thought to.    I'd particularly like to see some of our bright light (imitation) ivory tower (we're liberals, we don't hurt real elephants!) academics put out some research on the phenomenon, so we could attach some empirical numbers to it, and find ways to address it.  This is the right taking advantage of their authoritarian followers.  It's what they do.  We need to respond.