We live in an era of weaponized disinformation that reaches the highest levels of the United States Government. Donald Trump says the 2020 election was stolen. 139 Congressmen and 8 Senators objected to certification of the election results. There isn’t a lot of middle ground on this issue, either there are legitimate questions about the results of the election or there aren’t. One group of our country’s leaders is lying to us about the most important question our country faces. Many people in the United States genuinely believe that we’ve been had and that Biden should not have been inaugurated.
A large number of Americans have decided that they can no longer trust official sources of information, such as the news media or the government, to tell them the truth. They feel that they’ve been misled, and they are searching for answers. Unfortunately, confirmation bias is strong. We have a tendency to believe what feels compelling to us even if its coming from an anonymous Youtube channel with no credibility.
The Internet has provided us with access to a wide range of information sources. Many of those sources are lying to us or trying to push an agenda. It is up to each of us to assess their credibility. Evaluating the credibility of an information resource is a skill, and many people don’t understand how to do it well.
What follows are a set of techniques that I find useful for evaluating the credibility of information I’m exposed to. I think it’s important to teach these skills, as a democratic country cannot govern itself if its people are unprepared to defend themselves against disinformation.
· Question Your Allies
People naturally question assertions that conflict with their world view. We are most vulnerable to being misled by things that confirm what we already think, because we are more likely to accept those assertions without scrutinizing them carefully. Masters of military deception understand this principle and deliberately use it to manage the perceptions of their enemies and pull the wool over their eyes.
The first step that you must take when seeking the truth is to accept that you might be wrong. Be prepared to challenge your own assumptions. Employ a bit of self discipline when contending with information that you agree with or that is being presented by your own allies. Are you SURE that a particular fact is true? How do you know? Are there other facts that mitigate its significance?
· Look for Missing Facts
The way that political thought leaders manipulate people isn’t necessarily by making specific factual assertions that are incorrect, because false information can be directly refuted. A political thought leader can manipulate people by presenting some of the real facts and suggesting they add up to a particular conclusion, while omitting other relevant facts which undermine that conclusion.
I’ll use an equation as a metaphor. Suppose there are a set of facts, 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5, which add up to a particular conclusion, 15. Suppose also that an expert in the field has written an article in a popular magazine about this topic and that article talks about fact number 1, and 3, and 5 and suggests that the sum must be 9. It can be difficult to catch this sort of deception. In order to be aware of facts 2 and 4, and to know how they change the overall conclusion, you actually have to know more about this topic that the expert who is informing you about it. You have to be aware of everything the pundit hasn’t mentioned. One way to do this is to seek out other experts in the field who are also discussing the same topic and may have other relevant facts to share.
· Seek Counterpoints
When you read a persuasive article, it helps to see what other people are saying about it. Perhaps it omits important information or has been discredited. I wish the Internet had better tools for identifying counterpoints that have been published in response to what we are seeing. When I’m reading an article that I have questions about, I often search for the URL on Twitter. This can surface significant responses that people have written. Of course, anyone can say anything on Twitter. Sometimes I limit the search results to people that I follow.
(Its worth being aware that news companies sometimes add tags to the end of URLs that allow them to track where people are finding them. For example, the Washington Post often adds text like:
“?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.”
Removing the question mark and everything after it before searching for the URL on Twitter can improve the quality of the search results.)
· Evaluate Expertise
We have to trust professionals to explain complex topics to us. Unfortunately, professionals can use their expertise against us by making assertions that we don’t have enough information to verify. I think there are three questions that we should ask about people who are telling us what to think.
1. Do they have relevant expertise or credentials in **this** area?
2. What is their reputation in their field? Do other professionals in their field see them as credible?
3. Do they have a vested interest or political slant? Do they work for an organization with an agenda?
Two groups of people who often (but not always) meet these criteria are academic professors at well regarded universities, and professional government employees who are not political appointees.
A professor is a person who has credentials in their area of practice, and if they teach at a well regarded University, this means that a lot of other smart people believe they are doing credible work in their field. Of course, academics have political biases, but if they are being paid to teach at a University they are likely to be more objective than people with same credentials who work for political think tanks or private companies.
In the government there are career professionals who are not political appointees. Whereas political appointees serve to advance an agenda, career government employees serve the public. Many are highly credentialed, high respected, and politically objective.
Of course, academics and career civil service employees have institutional biases that they may not even be self aware of, and there are credible people who have important points to make who lack institutional credentials. In any case, someone’s expertise, reputation, and vested interests should be evaluated when considering their credibility. Institutional credentials are a shorthand that makes it easy, when they are available.
· Collect Credible Experts
A wonderful thing about the Internet is that we can get direct access to the opinions of credible experts without being intermediated by the news media. Many of these people post on blogs and social media, and anyone can follow what they are saying. If you invest time in identifying credible experts in fields that matter to you in advance of significant controversies, you’ll know where to turn when you need an interpretation of events, and you’ll have a sense of their political biases from seeing them discuss other issues over time.
Was the 2020 election stolen?
Having presented a set of techniques, can they be applied in practice to the claims being made about the 2020 election? A massive number of claims have been made, and I do not have the resources to systematically address each one. However, the claims reduce to two fundamental questions: 1. Was there a computer security problem in which voting machines where manipulated? 2. Was the election lawful?
1. Was the election hacked?
Many of the claims about computer security problems with the election come from a person named Russ Ramsland who is co-owner of a company called Allied Security Operations Group. Ramsland has filed affidavits in lawsuits challenging the election that make allegations of computer security flaws.
Ramsland fails the three criteria set forth above for evaluating the credibility of an expert. Ramsland claims to be a cybersecurity expert, but there is nothing to substantiate that claim. Ramsland is not widely recognized by other cybersecurity experts as a credible professional. However, Ramsland IS a Republican politician who has run for Congress in the past, which raises questions about his objectivity.
What do credible cybersecurity experts have to say about the security of the 2020 election? A group of 59 experts cosigned a letter in which they wrote that “no credible evidence has been put forth that supports a conclusion that the 2020 election outcome in any state has been altered through technical compromise.”
The people who cosigned this letter are all credentialed experts in the field of cybersecurity. Many are well known and widely respected in the field. Several of them have invented fundamental technologies that people use every day on the Internet to protect their communications.
Many of the cosigners of this letter have worked on elections security issues for decades and have been critical of the security of our elections in the past. If there was a legitimate concern about technical computer security problems in this election, these people would be highly concerned about it.
2. Was the election lawful?
We have a court system that is setup to assess the validity of lawsuits. All of the lawsuits seeking to change the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election have been thrown out or voluntarily withdrawn. That ought to put the question to rest, but many people continue to insist that these lawsuits were rejected on the basis of technicalities and the merits were never considered.
In fact, all of the filings from these lawsuits are a matter of public record. Because of the importance of these suits, many people have paid attention to the details and we can again turn to independent experts for analysis of what happened and why.
Jonathan Adler is a law professor at Case Western Reserve who has blogged for many years on a libertarian leaning group blog called the “Volokh Conspiracy.” When the Supreme Court issued a terse ruling that dismissed Texas’s challenge to the election (which Donald Trump referred to as “the Big One”), Adler took the time to carefully explain the ruling and the substantive legal issues in play. His post also links other posts which delve into the various filings and briefs in the case.
He wrote: “[The ruling] should not have been a surprise to anyone who was paying attention. The briefs submitted by AG Paxton’s office were weak on the facts and weak on the law. In some respects, as I noted in prior posts, they were downright embarrassing. The briefs filed in support of Paxton’s claims were, on the whole, not much better.”
Conclusion
There have been countless claims made about the 2020 election. Many of these claims are totally false. Others consist of a verifiable fact taken out of context and connected with conclusions that fact cannot support. I wish I had the time to systematically document and refute each one.
Part of the tactic here is to snow the truth in with lies. People who are invested in the idea that the election was stolen will cling to any claim that has not yet been refuted, despite that fact that so many others have. They’re sure the overall claim that the election was stolen must be true.
The key is to realize that we are most vulnerable to being misled by things that confirm what we already think. If you can recognize this vulnerability in yourself, you can escape the snow drift, and seek objective means of verifying what is and is not true.
