He believes millions of illegal immigrants voted in the election tho

March 9, 2018 11:59 AM

A beloved family member has drunk so much of the right-wing Kool-Aid that they believe even Snopes has a treacherous liberal bias. I'd like to be able to go through his cesspool of a Facebook page, identify the Russian troll factory-originated memes and accounts, and plunk a report down in front of him at the next family gathering. Are there any resources for this, like a directory of memes?

Yeah, I don't think he'll be particularly receptive to it either, but maybe it would plant a seed of doubt in his mind eventually.

posted by anonymous to Media & Arts (20 answers total)

Instead of picking apart his beliefs, is there some way to educate him on media and how it works in general? Kinda fix his reasoning surreptitiously?

Facebook wants to claim they are a platform, but in fact they are a media company, and we have laws and regulations governing how the media operates for Very Good Reasons. There is trial and error in the history of media laws, a lot can be learned by learning the history of media and the history around the laws dictating how media can operate. So much to be learned there...

I think he might accidentally get hip if you can slowly engage him in documentaries, podcasts, lectures, and books discussing media history. Once he's up to speed on the past, he might find current discussions about media policy and politics and media tech innovations more relatable.

I feel you on this! But no one ever listens to me when I make direct statements that are contrary to their beliefs, so now I think about how to get all sly about it. If they knew wonky details like I do, they would know better like I do. Y'know?
posted by jbenben at 12:13 PM on March 9, 2018 [4 favorites]

my mother is like this.

for a while after i found out she'd voted for That Guy, i stopped speaking to her. how could my own mother buy into this harmful garbage?! after the dust had settled and i was able to reconnect with her, i tried showing her the error in her thinking. thing is, she doesn't want to change the way she thinks-- it serves her in some way. it mystifies me, but i cannot change it.

so i accepted that she does not have good critical thinking skills and stopped engaging with her about politics and chose instead to focus on her being my mother. she's not getting any younger and she legitimately needs me (i am her only living family member). i decided that this relationship is more important than changing her political beliefs.

it's worked out well. we're ok now, and i'm grateful that our relationship has recovered. sometimes you have to accept that you cannot change someone's thinking and love them anyway. life is short! love your people as well as you can despite their shortcomings!
posted by hollisimo at 12:21 PM on March 9, 2018 [26 favorites]

I don't know if it's a good idea to give Trump and Alex Jones power over our relationships.

If you haven't seen it yet: The Backfire Effect
posted by rhizome at 12:29 PM on March 9, 2018 [5 favorites]

I have occasionally and with some success challenged some such beliefs by proposing a small, not friendship-destroying-sized wager, such as "if before April 15 you can find the names of over 100 cases since 2008 where a noncitizen actually cast a vote in a Federal election, I'll buy you a cheeseburger. If you can't, you have to buy me one. Deal?"

You have to be careful to set out your terms in advance, though, and this doesn't work for everything, but it does sometimes get people to be suspicious of their sources for some of the bedrock facts of their worldview.
posted by gauche at 12:42 PM on March 9, 2018 [9 favorites]

Snopes is what you're looking for in this situation. If she's already rejected that, I think you're pretty much SOL in that department.

I spent way too much of my precious time about 12 years ago arguing with a woman who either had the deadpan of six Buster Keatons or sincerely believed that the dictionary should be revised according to this self-help guidebook by some Duggar-style holy roller, because so many of the definitions are wrong.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:45 PM on March 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

Everyone has a kind of worldview, "The way things work," and they tie their identity to that. Challenging his beliefs == challenging his identity.

The way to change his view is to appeal to his emotional brain. Indirectly, that means appealing to his emotions, but more generally it means marketing your position, rather than just denying his, and also getting him to witness with his own eyes and feelings a contradiction between what he [says he] believes and what is true.

I recommend the 4-part Backfire Effect podcast series, which recently ended, in the above-linked You Are Not So Smart podcast. You might also give Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" a read, or maybe Drew Westen's "The Political Brain." (Or pretty much any author discussed on the YANSS podcast, a podcast and website about human self-delusion.)

Also, nota bene, you and me and everyone we know are not only vulnerable to the same sort of locked-in thinking, the worldview-linked identity, and the backfire effect, but we engage in it all the time, generally without realizing it (because our brains lie to us until we agree with our feelings, our "gut," which is to say our preexisting biases), and we're all hypocrites. So, if you get the feeling that you're morally superior to this guy, well, I hate to tell you, as "You Are Not So Smart" and Jonathan Haidt will also tell you, that humans' moral reasoning is unsound and based mainly on our biases.

I'm not telling you to get off your high horse-- I'm saying the high horse is a lie that your feelings are telling you because they want you to be the hero of your personal story. Everyone has the same bullshit high horse. So deal with this person, and other people, as an equal in the struggle to obtain and assimilate factual information into your worldview.
posted by Sunburnt at 1:00 PM on March 9, 2018 [23 favorites]

Would he accept Judicial Watch? 2014
posted by Ideefixe at 1:13 PM on March 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

I say: leave it. If they're trash-talking snopes.com for 'treacherous liberal bias" they're pretty far gone. If they accept obvious bullshit as fact then their concept of what a fact is is badly damaged and unlikely to be mended by any source you put in front of them.
posted by alrightokay at 1:14 PM on March 9, 2018 [13 favorites]

Evan McMullin’s Stand Up Republic and The Reagan Report on Twitter have been doing some really good conservative debunking of Russian-influenced fake news. I recommend it to anyone trying to break someone out of that worldview.
posted by corb at 1:19 PM on March 9, 2018 [8 favorites]

i wouldn't assume they actually believe all of what they're posting, or not all the time. they're sincerely espousing all these beliefs because they support the tribe, but i bet if in private they were asked to make prediction-market-style bets on their truth or falsity, you'd see a very different result. i doubt this is even conscious -- our brains are pretty flexible, and i guarantee you've done this too at some point in your life.

re: snopes, they are almost always accurate and do their best to present the truth. however, i think it's pretty clear where the underlying politics lie -- the site is run by people with liberal views and beloved of liberals. if you acknowledge that fact, it might help in getting this person to pay more attention to what they actually say. they are mostly your best bet.
posted by vogon_poet at 1:43 PM on March 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

Ok, so I thankfully do not have anyone like this in my life (knock wood), but I've thought a lot about what I would say to someone like this. I think my opening move would be to, in all sincerity, ask what their standard of proof would be. Is there anything out there, from any source, that would actually convince him to reconsider this belief? I think you sort of have to define the boundaries of the playing field before you decide to throw the ball. And that'll let you know also whether it's just futile. If they say that literally Rush Limbaugh would have to personally knock on their door and deliver a notarized sworn testimony, then I think you can get save yourself the frustration and walk away. If they've got even a slightly more reasonable expectation, maybe you can find an opening.
posted by soren_lorensen at 2:03 PM on March 9, 2018

Don't do this. You can't reason someone out of something they didn't reason themselves into. All this course of action will do is make them dig in their heels and damage your relationship with them. People who are into conspiracy theories don't believe because of the evidence, they do it because it confirms their pre-existing worldview in a way that they find comforting. The solution is not to attack them with facts (they have their own "facts" which are more valid to them because they come from sources they trust and because they support their worldview) but rather to changed their underlying worldview so that the conspiracy theory no longer comforts them. Good luck with that, it isn't easy.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:20 PM on March 9, 2018 [9 favorites]

Well, the backfire effect may not actually be real. But confirmation bias is a thing for sure.

I like the idea of opening a more general dialogue about media literacy, but otherwise, you probably have to let this one go.
posted by toastedcheese at 2:25 PM on March 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

In one of his Skeptoid podcasts, Brian Dunning talks about how to try to persuade someone to question their idiotic beliefs. His focus is on pseudoscience, but his suggestions might be relevant to politics. The idea that stuck with me was the suggestion that you don't in fact argue with them but instead ask if there are any things they've come across that strike them as far-fetched, and that allows them to demonstrate (or remind themselves) that they do have critical thinking skills, and you may be able to expand out from there.

I have never tried this myself, but it seemed the approach most likely to allow you to have a genuine conversation.
posted by kelper at 3:12 PM on March 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

Seconding everything Hollisismo said, only it was my dad. I had to come to terms with the fact that he does not want my info. He’s happy with his. And every time I engage him on “the truth” - it makes him angry. I mean, why wouldn’t someone 40 years his junior, whose diapers he changed, make him angry for thinking he’s being fooled. There’s no winning this one. I’ve focused on what I can save of our relationship. And I try to avoid politics as much as possible.
posted by greermahoney at 3:45 PM on March 9, 2018 [6 favorites]

→ …sincerely believed that the dictionary should be revised … because so many of the definitions are wrong

I'd say that about 1 in 4 letters that came in to the dictionary editorial office were along those lines: that word ______ was of the devil and if we valued our souls we would expunge it. It's a surprisingly common belief.

The look-for-proof-for-a-small-stakes-wager approach is as good as any
posted by scruss at 4:41 PM on March 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

You can't reason somebody out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. Their reasons for their beliefs are emotional, not logical. Put yourself as far as possible in their mindset, in their worldview. What are they afraid of? Why? If you can figure that out, work from there, like untangling a mess of cables behind a TV.
posted by signal at 5:20 PM on March 9, 2018 [5 favorites]

"You can't reason someone out of something they didn't reason themselves into."

Wow. Thanks, Anticipation.... I never thought of it this way, and it's so true. Wow.

So when next someone presents me with a statement such as "Sandy Hook was a fake, with paid actors" (and yes, a very close relative does say that), I won't try to respond with reason, but with feelings. "I know you've done a lot of research, but I am wary because there are so many false statements. I can't understand why someone would have arranged that. It just doesn't feel right. Why do you think it was done?" Then we're not engaged in dueling versions of truth. We're trying to understand.

As I said, thanks.
posted by kestralwing at 7:25 PM on March 9, 2018 [8 favorites]

You might find some help in this article about research at University of Cambridge:

"In medicine, vaccinating against a virus involves exposing a body to a weakened version of the threat, enough to build a tolerance.

Social psychologists believe that a similar logic can be applied to help "inoculate" the public against misinformation, including the damaging influence of 'fake news' websites propagating myths about climate change."
posted by anadem at 9:21 PM on March 9, 2018

How would you react if the beloved family member decided that you has drunk so much of the left-wing Kool-Aid that you needed to change your views?

In other words, what would it take for you to see the errors of your ways? Basically, this is how I understand your question.
posted by Kwadeng at 12:05 AM on March 10, 2018 [3 favorites]