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Disinformation (redux)
27 Plays3 years ago
Josh and M return to another "classic" episode and discuss "Disinformation!" Disinformation!
Sorry, patrons; there is no bonus episode this week!
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Introduction & Podcast Theme
00:00:00
Speaker
Where am I? The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. What do you want? Disinformation. Whose side are you on? That would be telling. We want disinformation. Disinformation. Disinformation. You won't get it. By hook or by crook we will. Who are you? The new 42. Where is number one? You are number 23. I am not a number, I'm a free man.
00:00:29
Speaker
Why are you laughing? I know your partner doesn't listen to the show, but still. Yeah, roll the theme. No, hang on. That's both a very cliche joke and one which rests on the kind of assumptions you typically question. I say for shame. For shame. Hold on. Whose side are you on? That would be telling. Sounds familiar. We want disinformation. Disinformation. Disinformation. You won't get it. By hook or by crook we will.
00:00:56
Speaker
I'll give you disinformation up the jacksy. Ooh, there they go.
00:01:23
Speaker
The
Meet the Hosts: Dr. M.R. Extenteth & Josh Addison
00:01:24
Speaker
Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy starring Dr. M.R. Extenteth and featuring Josh Addison as the interlocutor. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison and sitting next to me, don't go breaking my heart. I won't go breaking your heart. You couldn't if you tried?
00:01:47
Speaker
Actually, this intro is not quite word, but it's fine. It's fine. I kind of jumped in too soon, basically. Well, you should have come in with the right line. You could have said, I couldn't if I tried. I couldn't if I tried. Let's just try it again.
00:02:01
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I'm Josh Addison and sitting next to me, don't go breaking my heart, it's Dr. M, I re-extend it. I couldn't if I tried. Well, no, obviously.
Origins of Disinformation: Stalin & Trotsky
00:02:13
Speaker
So today we're going to be discussing disinformation. Disinformation? Disinformation. Disinformation. Josh, what is disinformation? Is it like dysentery? It is a little bit like dysentery. Really? I seem to recall last time we did this, I said a bit, talk about how it's the opposite of debt information, which
00:02:29
Speaker
I thought it was quite witty at the time, but we've already done that joke. And we don't need to revisit it. No. Disinformation. I don't know. Do we start with what it is? Do we start with the origin? I think we start with the origin because the origin, of course, is one of my favorite stories. So you've probably heard me wax lyrical about the Moscow show trials an awful lot. These were a set of trials back in 1930s Russia, where the Soviets were very keen to prove the existence
00:02:59
Speaker
of a plot against then leader Joseph Stalin by his then former friend Leon Trotsky. So Trotsky had basically been exiled from the USSR for being the kind of communist that Stalin didn't like.
00:03:15
Speaker
And Stalin became paranoid that Trotsky was basically trying to engineer a code to return back to Russia and take control of the Soviets. So he bade the proto KGB FSB to find evidence of Trotsky's plot.
00:03:34
Speaker
ProtoKGB has a look around, talks to people and reports to Stalin and goes, yeah, there's no plot man, you're fine, you're fine. Trotsky wants to format the communist revolution overseas because he thinks Russia's a failed state, so he wants to make communism a worldwide thing and then force you to adhere to that rather than come back here and seize control.
00:03:58
Speaker
And Stalin goes, yeah, that's not actually what I asked. What I asked was for evidence of a Trotskyist plot, so go find me some. And so they go off and they kidnap and arrest people, psychologically torture them for months on end, and then force them to purge themselves on the witness stand to prove the existence of a conspiracy against Stalin. That did not exist. And that story itself is quite fascinating.
00:04:27
Speaker
Now, there were anti-Stalinists out there, like John Dewey, the American pragmatist philosopher, who were skeptical that Trotsky was engaged in a plot to destabilize the USSR. And so they investigated these claims and discovered that the trial transcripts were incoherent and told an inconsistent story.
00:04:51
Speaker
which really did make it look as if the Soviets had fabricated evidence and claims. And so the Jewish Commission goes off and they present this information to the governments of the US and the UK, thinking those governments will take these claims seriously. And the governments of the US and the UK go, you know, we'll do it.
00:05:12
Speaker
We'll contact the Soviets and ask, have you been lying and caught again? And they contact the Kremlin and the Kremlin's response is no, that is disinformation. Or as we note in English, disinformation. Dewey and his cronies are making up things to make us look bad. You can trust us.
00:05:32
Speaker
Now, Josh, were the Soviets being truthful? As I understand it, they were not. No, because after Stalin dies and Khrushchev becomes chair of the party, Khrushchev, to distance himself from Stalin's acts and to make it look as if he wasn't complicit in any of these things, basically admits that the Jewish Commission was largely right about the Moscow trials and the lack of a conspiracy by Trotskyites to take control.
Disinformation vs. Propaganda
00:06:00
Speaker
As it turns out that when the Soviets labeled the Commission's findings as disinformation, that was the real disinformation the entire time. So disinformation then is a concept. It's false information put out deliberately to mislead
00:06:22
Speaker
What makes disinformation disinformation and not simply a lie or propaganda or fake news? Right. So what makes it different from a lie is usually the institutional aspect. So you can think of disinformation and propaganda as being related, but not the same. And that disinformation and propaganda are typically disseminated by state actors.
00:06:49
Speaker
So propaganda is usually governmental information designed to demoralize enemies and to make your public feel good. Not all propaganda needs to be misleading. You can spread propaganda to your enemy talking about how great life is in your country whilst telling the truth.
00:07:13
Speaker
So you can point out during World War II that the Nazis are really, really bad eggs and the Allies are not Nazis. That's propaganda. It's also true. Well, disinformation is usually a lie. I say usually is going to be a lie. It's going to be a case of
00:07:32
Speaker
You might say propaganda, where the propaganda is false and deliberately so, or if you don't think disinformation and propaganda are exactly the same thing, it's going to be related to, it's an example of government messaging or attempts at getting information across, which is false and misleading.
00:07:55
Speaker
And so there's one other big difference between propaganda and disinformation, which is why you might want to disentangle the so, is that propaganda tends to be fairly explicit and public, whilst disinformation actually might be done rather discreetly. So for example, one of the famous disinformation ops run by the Allies during World War Two,
00:08:17
Speaker
would be to take a dead parachuter put false information in amongst their effects in the hope the Nazis would find said dead parachuter when you dropped them from a plane thinking they'd been shot down and thus they would read the information and go hmm looks like d-day is off it's going to be a or c day instead and thus allowing you to have a beachhead in Europe
00:08:43
Speaker
In terms of the modern fake news catch cry, fake news is very much a general term these days, it's becoming more general by the day. Would disinformation be a subset of it, do you think, or is it too distinct?
00:08:59
Speaker
So if we take fake news to simply be more than news which is fake, but rather a kind of rhetorical measure, because I think there are kind of two notions of fake news in the literature, there is news which is actually fake, information presented as news which has been fabricated, and then there's the allegation that something is fake news.
00:09:23
Speaker
And both of those can serve the purpose of disinformation. So when, at the time of recording, President Donald J. Trump of the United States alleges that the information coming out of MNSBC is fake news, it is kind of a disinformation campaign designed to get people
00:09:51
Speaker
to not believe that particular kind of thing. So you're trying to disinform them in the same respect when the president makes claims, actually, you know, would be the president making claims, when a news, actually, yes, so it's the...
00:10:09
Speaker
Thinking on my feed here, which is always exciting, actual fake news, news which is, information which is presented as news and is false. If that's being disseminated by non-governmental organizations, we might want to resist calling that disinformation because there is no state actor involved at that particular point in time.
00:10:36
Speaker
It becomes more troublesome when you have news organizations which are either run by the government, as you find in certain Eastern European politics, or are subservient to the government with very close connections with governmental figures.
Institutional Role in Disinformation
00:10:52
Speaker
At which point you might go, well they're not technically a state actor, but they kind of are for the purposes of this kind of analysis. At that point that looks like
00:11:03
Speaker
disinformation. But it does seem, at least by my reckoning, what makes disinformation interesting is the role of institutions, particularly governmental institutions, producing information designed to mislead the public, presumably away from something bad that they're doing.
00:11:23
Speaker
Now you mentioned in comparison with fake news, it seems to be one of the key things about disinformation is that there are two sides to it. There's actual dissemination of disinformation and then there are claims that something is disinformation and those claims themselves could actually be disinformation as we saw with Stalin. So I guess in terms of relating this to conspiracy theories, why disinformation is a concern for conspiracy theories is that a lot of conspiracies
00:11:51
Speaker
conspiracy theories involve the actions of states. 9-11 conspiracy theories would be the obvious example there. And it is not uncommon, is it, that claims of disinformation tend to get thrown around fairly freely. Yes, so it's not uncommon, as you point out, for conspiracy theories to have implicitly in them.
00:12:16
Speaker
a claim that evidence to the contrary to the conspiracy might be an example of disinformation put forward by the conspirators. So this is a point that Charles Pigton actually pressed upon me when I was doing revisions to my PhD.
00:12:35
Speaker
It's not that claims of disinformation are inherent to conspiracy theories. They're only found in some conspiracy theories. And they're a kind of evidentiary auxiliary hypothesis. It's the idea that yes, there might be some evidence out there which says the conspiracy does not exist.
00:12:55
Speaker
But if you believe the conspiracy does exist and you think that the conspirators are minimally competent in their conspiracy, if they're in a position of power, then surely what they're going to do is produce information which shows the conspiracy doesn't exist or distracts from the claims about the conspiracy.
00:13:17
Speaker
So it's an auxiliary assumption of particular conspiracy theories to explain why evidence might not be forthcoming to that particular conspiracy theory. And once you think about disinformation claims in that particular regard, then you can ask the really important question,
00:13:38
Speaker
When is it rational to think that people are producing disinformation? And when is this auxiliary hypothesis going to be warrantless? Yeah, because that seems to be the problem there. It's sort of in the same way that you get conspiracy theories that say that the absence of evidence of their conspiracy is actually evidence for the conspiracy because that shows they're covering it up. That shows they've got something to hide.
00:14:04
Speaker
It seems like it is a fairly easy rhetorical move for people to make to say, you know, this evidence that appears to show our conspiracy is wrong is actually disinformation, which proves our conspiracy is right, because why would they be disseminating disinformation if the conspiracy didn't exist in the first place?
00:14:23
Speaker
So yeah, I guess you do need a way of saying when should we take these claims seriously and when should we just ignore them as vapid conspiracismizing? Conspiracism's ideation? Yeah, so do you believe it is possible to distinguish valid and invalid claims of disinformation?
9-11: Official vs. Alternative Theories
00:14:44
Speaker
So let's think through an example. So one of the big conspiracy theories in the 21st century is 9-11. And one of the big hypotheses in 9-11 is that the twin towers were not brought down by planes flying into them, but some kind of controlled dead militia.
00:15:07
Speaker
And so you'll get these people saying, you know, I'm a structural engineer, I'm a civil engineer, I've studied how buildings collapse. The way the Twin Towers collapsed was akin to freefall, which doesn't map two planes flying into them at different times, etc, etc.
00:15:25
Speaker
people who are proponents of the official theory of 9-11, which we should note is still a conspiracy theory. It's a conspiracy theory involving terrorists working for the organization Al-Qaeda, plotting in secret to achieve a terrorist end, as opposed to the 9-11 truth conspiracy theories that go know the people who enacted the plot are working within the US, or at least aren't working for Al-Qaeda.
00:15:54
Speaker
Proponents of the official theory will go, but no, we've got the Mist Report. The Mist Report quite clearly states that the collapse of the Twin Towers is congruent with two planes flying into them, causing structural damage and then fire damage due to that jet fuel which can mount steel beams,
00:16:18
Speaker
And so the way the Twin Towers collapse is actually perfectly consistent with all the models we have for impacts of that particular kind with that particular kind of structural damage and then ongoing damage due to fires. And so some 9-11 truthers will then go but that's just disinformation by the American government. NIST works for the American government or is at least affiliated with it.
00:16:43
Speaker
So of course they're going to be parroting what their paymasters tell them to do. Their paymasters are the people who committed the attacks in the first place. Wake up sheeple. It's quite clear what's going on here. Now, if that was simply a she said, she said situation, that would be quite fascinating.
00:17:07
Speaker
But of course the NIST report actually sits in with a bunch of other scientific reports made by organisations which are either not affiliated with the US government or less affiliated than NIST is as an organisation.
00:17:26
Speaker
And those reports also seem to a very large extent to support the claim that the twin towers were hit by two planes and not blown up by controlled demolition. So the kind of web of evidence is bigger than this here.
00:17:44
Speaker
which means the allegation that NIST in this version of the story is simply working for the American government and are agents of disinformation or are themselves disinformed, you then have to explain but what about all the other experts and other expert bodies which have claimed the same thing using their own models to get there. That seems to be a case where you either have to expand the claim of conspiracy at this point
00:18:13
Speaker
at which point it seems that no one can be trusted. Or maybe this disinformation claim just isn't actually warranted according to the available evidence. And I think that strikes me as similar to sort of climate change conspiracy theories where the claim is, or you'll always say, someone will say, you know, if 99 electricians told you that that thing will electrocute you and one of you, one of them said it would be fine,
00:18:41
Speaker
Are you going to do that thing? And people would be like, ah, but what if those 99 electricians were all being paid to tell me that it was unsafe?
Climate Change Denial: Motivations & Evidence
00:18:48
Speaker
By big electricity. And so, yeah, so you get similar claim, you know, the claim will be then in climate change conspiracy theories that the scientific suppose the scientific consensus is indeed a form of disinformation.
00:19:03
Speaker
But I think in that case, even more so than the 9-11 one, it seems less, more spurious. Just because I've never heard anyone actually say who this they is, or if they do, it's the government or whatever. The deep state. The deep state. But I've never once heard to what end.
00:19:22
Speaker
like you could understand for 9-11 the claim of disinformation that since your theory says it's the government that there would be very strong motive for the government to put this disinformation out there but in climate change I don't even see that. I mean so this is a weird sentence in defense of climate change deniers and I'm doing this as a speculative thing as opposed to defending them because I'm a firm believer that climate change is happening and much faster than we actually thought it was going to
00:19:52
Speaker
they often will argue that the motivating factor is research funding. So the reason why there's a cabal of scientists working to promote climate change as a viable scientific hypothesis is that's where the research funding is coming from. So you've got to conspire together to maintain the illusion that climate change is occurring to get the money to do more research into your illusory
00:20:18
Speaker
research work. Now the problem with that particular hypothesis, which once again speaks to, we have to take things in a broader context, is that if the work being produced is producing successful, say, predictive models and the like, it seems much more reasonable to assume that maybe the research is genuine
00:20:41
Speaker
and not the product of a lie because otherwise you suddenly have to start thinking that maybe nature itself is in on the conspiracy and at that point if nature's in on the conspiracy there's no stopping the conspiracy. Which is why you find so many climate change deniers who have to start denying actual evidence because they can't maintain their theory
00:21:08
Speaker
that everyone involved in interpreting the evidence is conspired when the evidence itself starts to become quite clear cut. So I mean it sounds like basically the same sort of thing we've been saying about conspiracy theories for a very long time, which is that claims of disinformation probably need to be evaluated on their own merits and can be.
00:21:29
Speaker
So talking about conspiracy theories in general, is disinformation a problem? Is it just a phenomenon that needs to be accounted for in theorizing about conspiracy theories?
Conspiracy Theories: Evaluating Disinformation
00:21:42
Speaker
Well, as I say, not every conspiracy theory has a claim of disinformation built in. It's an auxiliary assumption brought into some particular conspiracy theories. And so in that case, we have to judge those conspiracy theories on their evidential merits each and every time. So it's not a problem per se.
00:22:03
Speaker
The problem with claims of disinformation is they're probably going to be hard for individuals to work out whether you should take it seriously or not. Which is why I advocate a kind of community of inquiry approach to investigating these claims. The best way to solve the complex problem of investigating conspiracy theories is to
00:22:25
Speaker
engage in a community level and quite query where you're kind of sharing the epistemic load of how you investigate a conspiracy theory. Which means that people can start going well I've got more expertise when it comes to climate modeling data so let me go and have a look to see whether the numbers have been fudged. Well I'm much better for working out the organizational structures of
00:22:48
Speaker
engineering firms and scientific bodies. So let's see whether they are colluding or whether there's sufficient independence that their results can be treated as separate entities at which point it seems you'd have to talk about a larger conspiracy to explain the collusion or actually now I've looked into it and NIST and NASA
00:23:08
Speaker
basically are the same organization. So it might look like you've got two organizations saying the same thing, but really it's just one at which point we might be a bit suspicious about what's going on there. So yeah, it's going to be a problem in some cases and potentially the real problem is trying to work out
00:23:32
Speaker
how do we evaluate the claim, and how seriously should we take it, given that often these claims are quite complex, which of course is confronted by the fact that if there really is a conspiracy going on, minimally competent conspirators are likely putting this information out, like Nixon did about Watergate. And also how the Blair and Bush governments
00:24:01
Speaker
did with respect to those pesky weapons of mass destruction we still haven't seen. They were putting out disinformation to detract from people who were going actually to think there's a conspiracy here. Don't be ridiculous. There's no conspiracy. You can't seriously believe the President of the United States does bad things. That's inconceivable. Utterly inconceivable. I find myself unable to conceive it. I
Reflecting on Disinformation & Evidence
00:24:27
Speaker
don't think that word means what you think it means. It's entirely possible.
00:24:30
Speaker
So yeah, that's disinformation for you. I possibly should have said at the start now that I think of it, because our previous one of these sort of catch-up-y, recap-y episodes from The Can was about evidence, wasn't it? It wasn't evidence in general, and disinformation is basically a subspecies of evidence.
00:24:50
Speaker
whether that be whether certain evidence itself is disinformation or whether it's claimed that certain evidence is disinformation. It's something you've got to take account of because we think you should evaluate conspiracy theories on the evidence. We do indeed and that also requires evaluating claims of disinformation without dismissing them out of hand but asking the question
00:25:15
Speaker
Is it actually reasonable to expect disinformation in this situation? And if so, how do we decide between something being disinformation or not being disinformation given the available data? So there you go, disinformation, disinformation and another episode in the can.
00:25:34
Speaker
That's disinformation. That's that disinformation. Trying to get that information in there, but it's not working. Not quite. No. But valiant attempt. So there we go. We've recorded an episode for The Can, which who knows when we knew the listener actually going to be hearing this. Could be any time in the future. All the past. All the past. I mean, you might be listening back. No, but they couldn't be listening to it before we record it, though, because that's not how time works.
00:26:02
Speaker
As far as we know. Well, yes, precisely. I mean, frankly, we could be very wrong about time. It could be very timely. Now, this is usually the point in the show where we talk about what's coming up in our patron bonus episode, which will be recorded at some nondescript point in the future. So, Josh, predictions as to what we'll be talking about in the patron bonus episode.
00:26:26
Speaker
Well, first I should probably say that generally we only take an episode out of the can when we can't get together a record, so there probably wouldn't be a bonus plan. But if there is, assuming... We've always tried to find some way to get the patron bonus content. The patrons do deserve it. That's true. They are the most deserving of all the listeners. Well, I mean, I assume the number one news will be, of course, Donald J. Trump's third term as president.
00:26:50
Speaker
Third and final term, given that once he receives his third term, he will abolish the notion of elections. Or indeed the notion of mortality. What else could be going on? I don't know. Monkeys? They're always up to something. That's true. I mean, they're probably producing Shakespeare 2.0 as we speak. And they've been hiding that from us for quite some time. And then otherwise, I don't know, probably it'll turn out something's bad for you.
00:27:20
Speaker
It's going to know that cancer is bad for human beings. You heard it here first. Don't go around, go getting that cancer. Cancer and it's caused by, it's the cause of vitamin C. The singer who did the graduation song. She was in Dracula 2000. She was, that was a weird lateral move I have to say.
00:27:44
Speaker
I actually read a piece about her a few months ago. Wasn't she some sort of a prodigy?
00:27:52
Speaker
Yes, and she was also a songwriter who kind of accidentally became a singer-star for that one particular song, but then went back to doing songwriting by and large, and a few bit rolls across the board, but basically just went back to writing and producing. Like Charlie Puth with that Till I See You Again song from The Fast and the Furious. Yes, basically. Oh, and to date this, have you seen the trailer for Fast 9, the Fast Saga?
00:28:19
Speaker
Yes, and I have to say I agree with people who've said that the trailer, while it includes a car driving off a cliff, getting grabbed with a magnetic clamp by a secret, super secret spy plane, and then another car jumps off the same cliff, latching on to the wire of a suspension bridge to Tarzan swing across an entire chasm. Still the most unrealistic thing about it is the idea that John Cena might be Vin Diesel's brother.
00:28:45
Speaker
except that as soon as Michelle Rodriguez is going to say Gomez, because I've got Doctor Who on the brand, was going, it's his brother, it's quite obviously going to be his brother, but no, I think the best thing about that trailer is justice for harm.
00:29:06
Speaker
Yeah, what's that about? Are they gonna say he wasn't dead after all? Because they've revisited that scene in Toko Drift at least once when they put Jess and Statham into it. Because he was the one who drove into the car. I'm assuming we're going to revisit that scene again. There's going to be some secret compartment in the back of the car and he flipped out or something.
00:29:28
Speaker
although many people ago know they're finally going to bring in DeLoreans and time travel to the last saga. Well exactly. To think that film, that the very first film which was a purely note, a beat-by-beat rip-off of Point Break with Cars instead of Surfboards, is now about superheroes, super spies.
00:29:50
Speaker
and it's kind of great who would have thought that that franchise would go from not particularly good to something which is a guilty pleasure anyway enough talking about movies that will presumably be completely out of date by the time this episode is uh we'll let you good listeners go about your business
00:30:12
Speaker
Monkey business. We'll go back to tending to the can. It's true. The can is angry, so the can must be placated by putting this episode into it, because if we don't, well let's just say, actually no we can't, because frankly it's just too horrific to even think about. So you sleep peacefully tonight, safe in the knowledge that the can is satisfied for now. But only for now.
00:30:42
Speaker
And we'll talk to you later. Goodbye. So this is just a little in note. This
Personal Note & Contact Information
00:30:52
Speaker
is of course one of our classic episodes or an in the can episode which comes out when circumstances dictate that Josh and I cannot record. This time round it's due to a little bit of a medical emergency in my family
00:31:07
Speaker
which means that I'm in a situation where I spent a large chunk of last night sitting beside a bed in a hospital and am not really in the position to go into detailed discussion about philosophical work in conspiracy theory as this week's episode was meant to be one of our paper reviews or conspiracy theory masterpiece theatre.
00:31:31
Speaker
Now, the reason why I'm putting this little coder at the end is that normally we make this promissory note about what's going to happen to the patrons, or at least what the patrons are going to be able to find out about. But this time round, there is not going to be a patron bonus episode this week because I'm frankly too tired to record anything more than this little bit of explanatory text right here. So patrons, I apologize. There is nothing for you this week.
00:32:00
Speaker
So you'll just have to persevere like we all do in 2021, the year which appears to be the inadequate sequel to 2020, whatever that means. And of course we'll be back with a fresh brand new recording next week, as long as things go according to plan. So until then, toodly bye bye, and I'll return you now to the usual end theme for the episode.
00:32:25
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, hosted by Josh Ederson and Ndentit. If you'd like to help support us, please find details of our pledge drive at either Patreon or Pod Bin. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com. And it goes all carry on. It does indeed. It was because I had no idea how to end it. Yeah.
00:32:53
Speaker
Oh, hang on, should I have thought of a song for the classic ones? What have I been listening to today? Hounds of Love? How the hell can it work? What are we listening to in the thing? Dammit, choose a song out of every song you know. Erasure's Chains of Love? I don't know. I've got you paid by share. Good work. You're going to have to make it work.