You probably imagine anonymous internet commenter,
or a shock jockey,
or a partisan hack. You probably
don't imagine the Senate Majority Leader, or the Speaker of the House of
Representatives or the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
But maybe
you should, because if the past few months of batshit political coverage
have shown us anything...
"Bombshell accusations", "missing text messages",
"secret societies",
"secret memos",
"one hell of a conspiracy",
"that does go deeper than Watergate". "Deeper than Watergate?"
It's that trolling is now the work of
serious politicians.
We begin tonight with the unraveling of a conspiracy
theory - this one was created and promoted by elected officials on Capitol Hill.
Trolling has been used to refer to a lot of different bad behaviors, but at its heart
it means deliberately provoking someone in order to bait them into overreacting.
Milo Yiannopoulos does this all the time.
He says something he knows is
ridiculous.
and then smiles as the audience freaks out.
Because I don't want to spend a whole video talking about Milo, let's use a
different example.
Let's use Charlie Brown.
What?!
Let's just go with me.
You've watched this scene a million times, right?
Lucy promises to let Charlie Brown kick
the ball, Charlie tries to kick it, she pulls it away and he falls flat on his ass.
This scene is basically trolling 101.
The troll baits their target "I'll hold
the ball and you kick it". The target gives the desired reaction,
"this time I'm gonna kick that football clear to the moon."
And then the truth is revealed
the troll was just leading them on.
"what does this have to do -"
"I'm getting there!"
So how would this formula work if you're trying to troll a major news network?
First you'd need the bait.
Promise reporters you have some big bombshell
they have to pay attention to.
"Republican lawmakers claiming they have
documents, classified memos, secret memos, to prove widespread abuse by the FBI".
"What I read it is as bad as I thought it was. The entire Mueller investigation is a lie."
Then you get a reaction: days of wall-to-wall news coverage about what
might be in your super secret memo.
"The secret memo at the center of an
extraordinary plan. We don't know what's in the memo. As a journalist I want to
see what's in the memo. Should that be released to the public? Have you
decided if you'll release the memo? Why not allow people to look at it?
You've read the memo? I read the memo.
And? Well obviously I can't tell you what's in the memo.
So I can't discuss what was
in the memo, but I can tell you the American people need to see it." And then
the reveal: your big bombshell turns out to be a dud.
"The memo has now been
released, this memo is a dud, a complete dud. It doesn't say anything it calls
into question the wider Mueller probe. It over-promised and under-delivered, the
revelation is precisely the opposite of what they wanted to reveal." And news
networks have to explain to their viewers that the scandal they've been
following for days, was actually nothing.
"They build it up, they build it up,
and then it's about nothing."
"This is what all the hype was about?"
Now at first glance this story has a happy ending, right? The truth eventually came out.
But if you view this story as a giant troll, it looks very different.
News networks spent days telling audiences that a huge scandal could be brewing.
Millions of people read headlines about the FBI potentially being corrupt and
Republicans got to go on TV and tell their supporters that they're right to be
suspicious of the Mueller investigation.
"I'm good with a memo coming out because
it exposes the FBI coming after a political opponent.
Uh, okay it's not an answer to my question."
The beauty of trolling is that the truth
doesn't actually matter.
When Lucy says
"This time you can trust me. See? Here's a signed document."
She knows she's lying. And she knows she's going to get caught lying.
When Charlie tries to kick the ball she is literally fact-checking her, but the
point isn't to be honest. It's to provoke a response, to get Charlie to try and
kick or in the case of the Nunes memo, to get the media to overreact.
"The juice better be worth the squeeze on this one, this is like six news cycles now.
"Well I'm excited to find out what's in the memo"
And though we typically think of
trolling as something people do for fun, in politics it has way scarier
consequences. For one it's a great way to distract the news cycle
away from serious stories.
The same week that Nunes started talking about the memo,
the New York Times reported that Trump had seriously considered firing Mueller.
Look at which story dominated cable news chyrons.
But it's not just a focus
problem, this kind of trolling works because audiences remember negative
information even when it's been debunked.
Political scientist Emily Thorson ran
an experiment where people were exposed to a piece of negative political
information and then saw a correction. And she found that people's attitudes
towards the target of the lie got worse even after the lie was debunked.
She calls this "belief echoes" and that's when people are given a full clear correction.
Most casual news consumers won't get that or if they do, they'll see headlines
like this.
"Republicans released secret memo accusing investigators of bias."
"Memo released alleging FBI cover-up."
Or chyrons like this.
"Memo says FBI abused surveillance power."
Even after the lie is revealed, it's repeated in news coverage.
The result is a news environment that incentivizes bad faith, that rewards
politicians who are willing to commit to a lie. And so you've seen more and more
pseudo scandals following the same formula.
There's the bait, missing text messages,
a secret society in the FBI,
"it's one hell of a conspiracy and people
at the top levels of our government were involved in it. A secret society, there's
anything more about that? No, we have to dig into it. That's that's this is not a
distraction."
There's the reaction.
"The startling allegations of a secret
society, is there any basis to that claim? Is there a secret society?
Those things are troubling."
And eventually there's the reveal.
"Republican lawmakers are left empty-handed, when the texts are found
and the secret society is revealed to be a joke."
On their own, none of these
stories hold water but together, they help sow doubt in the minds of voters.
Help build a vague but persistent belief echo.
are we seriously still talking about the secret society Ben?
Which helps explain why so many Republican voters
are now suspicious of the FBI.
A trend that's gotten worse over the past year.
Unsurprisingly, Nunes is already promising to release more memos in the future.
"He told Brett Baier tonight that more memos are coming, stay tuned. Tick-tock."
And the sad thing is he'll probably generate the same media circus
when he does.
What politicians say is newsworthy.
"I'm shocked to read exactly what has taken place."
Networks can't just ignore them, the way that we might block an
internet troll. And what makes trolling in politics so effective is that it's
almost impossible to prove while it's happening.
Charlie could never be sure if
Lucy is gonna yank the ball away.
The audience can never really know if Milo
means what he's saying,
and journalists can't know if the next Nunes memo is
actually a bombshell until he releases it.
But what they can do is practice more
restraint, to treat these stories not as potential bombshells, but as potential
bait and to be aware of the way that their coverage might be playing into the
hands of a troll.
Charlie may never be able to resist trying to kick the ball,
but if he holds back a little bit, if he avoids kicking quite, so hard he can at
least avoid falling flat on his ass.