“The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.”
– John Philpot Curran
A colleague of mine once told a story about her husband, John. Actually, let me rephrase that: the tale was more about John’s love for the cycling legend, Lance Armstrong. Lance, the former American professional road racing cyclist was a seven times winner of the prestigious Tour de France. When it came to Lance, John, a celebrated heart surgeon was but a hapless groupie. His obsession became total when the legend rose from fighting a potentially fatal testicular cancer to win one more of his highly competitive race.
Not long after those quick succession of victories and to his fan’s utter disappointment, cycling’s most decorated champion became the subject of a doping allegation. It all came to a screeching halt on 17 January 2013, when in front of a national audience, Lance Armstrong, considered one of America’s greatest athletes, confessed to have deployed a cocktail of performance enhancing drugs that included growth hormone, erythropoietin and diuretics to cheat his way to victory. Not suprising, John took the story of his hero’s fall so hard and was completely devastated. The sad news served him the kind of gut punch that obtains when the Spider-Man in your life comes crashing.
Despite his hero’s admission of guilt, John remained in total disbelief and as a matter of fact, decided thenceforth that Lance Armstrong was above reproach. That meant that any report unflattering of him got to be someone else’s fault. My colleague was shocked that her highly regarded and supposedly informed husband deliberately chose not to face the truth. ”He would weave his own story to escape from reality and refused to hold his hero accountable for any of his infractions”, she stated.
Another experience describes a similar concept though differently. Birtherism and the 44th President of the United States.
Even after Donald Trump, the arrowhead of the conspiracy theory finally acknowledged that Barrack Obama was born in the US, there were still a good chunk of his followers who despite the fact that Mr. Obama showed his birth certificate in both the short and long form, continued to insist that he was born outside of the US. These were the same group that likely would dismiss Trump’s salacious and creepy ”grab ’em by the….” comment as boys being boys. If you can’t blot it out of your consciousness, the second-best option is to water down the seriousness of it all. Boys being boys for sure sounded way better than ascribing the label of a sex predator to Mr. Trump. Of course, without the infamous video clip those followers would have sworn with their lives that the fake news media was out to get their messianic President.
In those two separate scenarios, believing in anything else meant the individuals involved would face the onerous task of having to deconstruct what was built in the mind over the years. To them, it sure was much easier to live in an alternative universe instead. Such is a not too subtle form of psychological manipulation that gaslights one into a state of cognitive dissonance. This may sound a bit strange but funny enough, most of us are victims of such except when an individual makes a conscious effort to rid oneself of those primordial shackles to become free.
Truth is everyone has a bias. We are either born with it or grew up having some form of it. It doesn’t even matter that one may not acknowledge it. Most times it exists within the subconscious and that’s why we are often in denial. We are first a product of our own genome and later our growth environment. That is something we just can’t help. Well, we actually can to a good extent but it takes a lot of effort and hard work to overcome.
Make no mistake, humans are more emotional than rational creatures. Have you ever wondered why someone may decide to find every reason to latch tenaciously onto an obvious falsehood despite all the available evidence to the contrary? It may also not be unconnected with the reason why we tend to click and share things that are more likely to support our positions. That means that if you are a fan of Barrack Obama, you are more likely to share whatever positive thing someone might say about him while conveniently ignoring those critical of him. The converse is also true.
One of the ways Putin helped Donald Trump win the 2016 US presidential election was through the use of a sophisticated Russian disinformation campaign that exploited both individual and system bias. The same way you are surprised to see a product you clicked on Amazon show up in your Facebook feed is same way peddlers of conspiracy theories look out for a would-be victim. They utilise a complex algorithm that tracks our predilections and use that to figure out individual bias in order to predict behaviours.
Among the main target of the Russian campaign was the African-American community, a core base of the Democratic Party. Russians knew the impact of bringing up racial issues among this group and wouldn’t stop talking about Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill. This was the bill that prosecutors seized upon to send lots of young black men to prison. I don’t believe Clinton consented to that bill specifically to target blacks but it was nonetheless a very effective propaganda tool. They knew exactly what to say to sow the seed of distrust in people’s mind. They took to Facebook, Twitter and attacked from multiple fronts. They were everywhere and you just couldn’t escape their reach. The attack was relentless.
In the end, folks in the black community who already knew enough not to vote for Donald Trump, were also dissuaded from going out to vote for Hilary Clinton. The result was that in many states that Trump ended up winning in the electoral college, black turnout was an all-time low. The black voter’s turnout rate declined for the first-time in 20 years in a presidential election, falling to 59.6% in 2016, after reaching a record high 66.6% in 2012. They stayed home and the rest they say is now history. That was how black America unwittingly handed out victory to the one she loves to hate. That was the pervasive power of disinformation and the art of modern warfare. Truth is, by our actions and inactions we are all unwilling soldiers recruited in this fight. If you have ever shared an article on Facebook, WhatsApp or any other platform, you may have helped magnify a voice for good or evil.
In this age of Russian troll farms, Infowars and fake news, we all have a little choice to make. One such is to educate yourself, do a little digging and maybe step an inch closer to the truth. But that’s only if you care for the truth. The alternative is to conveniently join the army of click and share across social media platforms. With that you can then elect to help sketchy characters propagate whatever conspiracy, bigoted and quite often hateful ideologies they sell every day. Or better still, spread misinformation as long as it reinforces your own personal bias.
The choice is definitely ours to make. Maybe the next time you are tempted to share a controversial essay or an inciting video, first do your best to verify if the source is even credible. Ask yourself commonsense questions. Make sure it passes those basic tests and resist the urge to believe everything and disseminate quickly. Such restraint may be a small but very consequential role you play in defending our freedom and shaping our world. A better world for us today and that which we one day hope to pass on to our children. So, help us God.
•Dr. Agbo is the president/CEO of African Center for Transparency and writes from USA. Email: [email protected]
