By: Peyton Schismenos
*Below is the blog form of the audio I recorded above*
“They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats!”
The musician above made a fun remix, highlighting the misinformation inherent but it became a pro-trump meme. He donated the proceeds to the Clark County SPCA, a measure to reduce cruelty but the damage and reminder of the falsehoods peddled with no factchecking makes this work potentially harmful.
DID YOU GUYS SEE THE DEBATE???
The Springfield Debate topic covers misinformation, but only a little, and only in overt scenarios.
Political speech and misinformation have been seen as inseparable concepts, and yeah, it’s true that something can be political speech AND misinformation, and it’s allowed, but they don’t need to be. You can use strong rhetoric and evidence and heavily criticize your opponent without being deceptive. Consistent, contextual arguments can strengthen your argument while remaining calm and collected. The key is to have your notepad and laptop ready to disprove the disinformed.
Politics is a difficult arena; the average American citizen slept through their gov and econ classes and then complained that things never change; they also get the same number of votes you do. Politicians appeal to this group and many others just to get the vote. They say something that a large audience can pick up on and agree with and then collect the votes. If nobody on their “side” asks questions, they get away with it.
It all makes sense, but that makes misinformation worse! If what you say is gonna be heard by a bajillion people, then missing context, non-answers, and blatant lies are even less acceptable.
They won’t change on their own, so we will. The method: Be CIDS (Kids): Curious, investigative, diligent, and skeptical
What can be disproven?
You’re probably wondering where to start. Yeah, it’s confusing, but just be curious, I wonder what a politician means when they say something. Recently, during the presential debate, I heard Kamala Harris’ promise that she trusts women and that Congress will pass a bill to protect reproductive rights, and she would sign it. If you’re wondering what Harris means by that, I am, too. Even further, ask how she could accomplish that. Now you’re being curious and skeptical. We complete the remaining steps by investigating diligently. But where do we start?
Curiosity
I will start to investigate in a few steps. Step 1 is writing the claims made. We do this to figure out if it’s falsifiable or unfalsifiable. Is it a claim that cannot be proven false? One example of an unfalsifiable hypothesis is the claim that we are all in a high-end simulation and nothing is truly real. Anyone making these claims is almost certainly propagating misinformation because not being able to access information about a claim means it’s not based on them. Nobody can be everything proof, Greg.
Investigation
But once Greg goes back to sleeping in civics, you can start on step 2: figuring out which claims you can investigate. Harris’ claims from earlier are like all political campaign promises, dependent on the future. So, we can’t know if they’ll come true. What we do know is she’s been in office before; we also know that she’s the vice president, so she knows what it takes for Congress to pass a bill. Once you’ve found specific claims, you’ll start step 3, lateral reading.
Diligence
Lateral reading is where you keep opening a new tab to find information surrounding what you’re talking about; you stop when you find something, investigate the source of it, find better coverage for it, and then trace all the claims back. We do this until we’ve figured out the validity of the claims made. The process described is known as the SIFT method. The claims were that Harris trusts women for reproductive health, that Congress would pass a bill under her, and she would sign it. I like to go on political speakers’ websites to read their platforms: They have a list of policies to go into detail on what they’re doing in office and how. I use Bernie Sanders’ website as an example of a good way to show your policies, he has clear explanations for how things will pass along with what it’ll accomplish. These sites are great as a starting point, but shouldn’t be where you stop; stay curious. Harris has her positions on reproductive freedom here but they don’t say much.
She needs to include key context here. I’m sure she wants to do this but let’s see what we would need for congress to pass a law, for it to get to Harris. This is misleading if you read into it far enough. In truth we need, a majority of the house, and then, a majority of the senate to vote for it to even get the bill on her desk.
Ok, cool, now we know that information, we ask how this omission happened.
Skepticism
Another aspect of this investigation we consider is history (along with the context), Harris is the current vice president, which means she’s the president of congress as well. Now, we don’t have majority congress, but why isn’t that being brought up by Harris? Well, it’s inconvenient, doesn’t lend itself to her soundbite, so it’s omitted. So, it’s misleading at best, omits key information, and is highly dependent on a democratic supermajority. It’s weird to read into a major campaign promise and see that it’s not really that simple; this is both rally-speak and misinformation.
Now that we know that history and reasoning is important, I wanna bring up numbers. Some politicians say the worst numbers on crime or the most border passes, without clearing up the information or making specific claims. Again, both the context and the ability to prove these claims are important, the information can be very misleading if we wield facts to mean what they don’t.
The biggest thing you’re probably asking is why this even matters; what about the moderators on debates? They fact-checked Trump on his misinformation in real time, it was efficient right? Well, they’re nice, and they sound good at first, but then you don’t get to the conclusion yourself. You become secondary to another person’s journalism, you lose the ability to learn that it’s false; We need people actively curious and skeptical, fact-checking everything they hear from a politician. We also need them to vote; register now! Thank you for watching.
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