Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield write:

Try to remember for a moment how you felt on January 6, 2021. Recall the makeshift gallows erected on the Capitol grounds, the tear gas, and the sound of the riot shields colliding with hurled flagpoles. If you rewatch the video footage, you might remember the man in the CAMP AUSCHWITZ sweatshirt idling among the intruders, or the image of the Confederate flag flying in the Capitol Rotunda. The events of that day are so documented, so memed, so firmly enmeshed in our recent political history that accessing the shock and rage so many felt while the footage streamed in can be difficult. But all of it happened: men and women smashing windows, charging Capitol police, climbing the marbled edifice of one of America’s most recognizable national monuments in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

It is also hard to remember that—for at least a moment—it seemed that reason might prevail, that those in power would reach a consensus against Donald Trump, whose baseless claims of voter fraud incited the attack. Senator Lindsey Graham, a longtime Trump ally, was unequivocal as he voted to certify President Joe Biden’s victory that night: “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.” The New York Post, usually a pro-Trump paper, described the mob as “rightists who went berserk in Washington.” Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which had generally allowed Trump to post whatever he wanted throughout his presidency, temporarily suspended his accounts from their service. “We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote then.

Yet the alignment would not last. On January 7, The Atlantic’s David A. Graham offered a warning that proved prescient: “Remember what yesterday’s attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol was like,” he wrote. “Very soon, someone might try to convince you that it was different.” Because even before the rioters were out of the building, a fringe movement was building a world of purported evidence online—a network of lies and dense theories to justify the attack and rewrite what really happened that day. By spring, the narrative among lawmakers began to change. The violent insurrection became, in the words of Republican Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia, a “normal tourist visit.”

The revision of January 6 among many Republicans is alarming. It is also a powerful example of how the internet has warped our political reality. In recent years, this phenomenon has been attributed to the crisis of “misinformation.” But that term doesn’t begin to describe what’s really happening.

Think back to the original “fake news” panic, surrounding the 2016 election and its aftermath, when a mixture of partisans and enterprising Macedonian teenagers served up classics such as “FBI Agent, Who Exposed Hillary Clinton’s Cover-up, Found Dead.” Academics and pundits endlessly debated the effect of these articles and whether they might cause “belief change.” Was anyone actually persuaded by these stories such that their worldviews or voting behavior might transform? Or were they really just junk for mindless partisans? Depending on one’s perspective, either misinformation posed an existential threat for its potential to brainwash masses of people, or it was effectively harmless.

But there is another, more disturbing possibility, one that we have come to understand through our respective professional work over the past decade. One of us, Mike, has been studying the effects of our broken information environment as a research scientist and information literacy expert, while the other, Charlie, is a journalist who has extensively written and reported on the social web. Lately, our independent work has coalesced around a particular shared idea: that misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine. A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away, and the incentives of the modern attention economy—people are rewarded with engagement and greater influence the more their audience responds to what they’re saying—means that there will always be a rush to provide one. [Continue reading…]