How Do We Fight That Viral Lie That Happened This Week?
Plus: Announcing our next pastors conference!
We witnessed this week how quickly a lie can spread within certain internet information bubbles.
If you haven't heard about this, buckle in, because this is wild. If you know the story, you can skip down to the "What can we do?" subheading.
On Tuesday, a court filing in Trump's classified documents case was unsealed revealing the FBI's policy statement on the use of deadly force. The policy states, "Law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force only when necessary, ...," but the court filing neglected to include the word "only." Based upon that simple misprint, right-wing media started claiming that President Joe Biden authorized the FBI to assassinate Trump during the FBI's raid on Mar-a-Lago.
On Tuesday evening, the Trump campaign sent out an email with the subject line, "They were authorized to shoot me!" The body of the email claimed, "Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger." Notably, this was a fundraising email.
The claim that Biden tried to kill Trump spread quickly across right-wing media and social media. "The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light," Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-GA, posted to X.
In response, the FBI said, “The FBI followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force. No one ordered additional steps to be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter."
But that hasn't stopped the Trump campaign from continuing to spread this falsehood. Just this morning, the campaign sent an email repeating the lie with the subject line, "I nearly escaped death."
Here are a few news sources on this story:
“FACT FOCUS: Trump distorts use of ‘deadly force’ language in FBI document for Mar-a-Lago search”
“How Trump used his own court filing to claim an ‘assassination’ attempt”
“Trump falsely claims Biden, FBI had plan to assassinate him during Mar-a-Lago search”
What can we do?
This misinformation is being spread among people who've been told that Biden is crooked, demonic, a pedophile, and for some, he's part of an underground group that kills babies and drinks their blood. The notion that Biden tried to kill Trump just confirms all the prior beliefs of someone like that. If you have a friend or loved one that deep down the rabbit hole, you're not likely to change their mind right away. But your friend needs help, and you may be the only one in their life that can help them. It will be a difficult task but difficult tasks can still be worth attempting, and truth needs advocates. Just remember to keep your love for that person at the front of your mind and accept that some things are out of your control.
"Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me. The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
To learn more on becoming an advocate for truth, we've created a resource called Mending Division Academy and this month you can get it for half-off with the code “MAY50.”
Watch this short clip from one of the courses where Dr. Daniel Bennett provides 3 tips on how to help loved ones consumed by conspiracism.
Our Next Conference!
Race, Extremism, and Reconciliation
Helping pastors heal the wounds of our divided nation in their churches and communities
When: July 25
Where: Mercer University North Campus in Atlanta.
Confirmed speakers will be announced soon.
EARLY BIRD SPECIAL: The first 20 tickets will be sold for only $10!
You can buy tickets now or sign up here to get on your email list for updates.
What Else We’re Reading
NYT: “‘We’ll See You at Your House’: How Fear and Menace Are Transforming Politics”
By almost all measures, the evidence of the trend is striking. Last year, more than 450 federal judges were targeted with threats, a roughly 150 percent increase from 2019, according to the United States Marshals Service. The U.S. Capitol Police investigated more than 8,000 threats to members of Congress last year, up more than 50 percent from 2018. The agency recently added three full-time prosecutors to handle the volume.
More than 80 percent of local officials said they had been threatened or harassed, according to a survey conducted in 2021 by the National League of Cities.
“People are threatening not just the prosecutor, the special counsel, the judge but also family members,” said Ronald L. Davis, director of the U.S. Marshals Service. Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said she saw “an environment where disagreement is increasingly tipping over” into “violent threats.”
Read the whole thing (gift link).
More in Common: “Do Americans Prefer a World Without TikTok?”
More in Common recently released a report to explore people’s attitudes around the benefits of social media and support for various government regulations. In addition to exploring Americans’ attitudes, we also surveyed people living in France, Germany, and the UK to explore how beliefs compare across these countries.
Below are some of our key findings.
Study: “Anger Increases Susceptibility to Misinformation”
Abstract. The effect of anger on acceptance of false details was examined using a three-phase misinformation paradigm. Participants viewed an event, were presented with schema-consistent and schema-irrelevant misinformation about it, and were given a surprise source monitoring test to examine the acceptance of the suggested material. Between each phase of the experiment, they performed a task that either induced anger or maintained a neutral mood. Participants showed greater susceptibility to schema-consistent than schema-irrelevant misinformation. Anger did not affect either recognition or source accuracy for true details about the initial event, but suggestibility for false details increased with anger. In spite of this increase in source errors (i.e., misinformation acceptance), both confidence in the accuracy of source attributions and decision speed for incorrect judgments also increased with anger. Implications are discussed with respect to both the general effects of anger and real-world applications such as eyewitness memory.
Link.
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