BY: Osy Agbo
A colleague of mine once told a story about her husband John. Actually, it was more about John’s love for Lance Armstrong. Lance, the former American professional road racing cyclist was a seven times winner of the prestigious Tour de France.
When it comes to Armstrong, John, a celebrated heart surgeon is a groupie. His obsession became total when Lance rose from fighting a potentially fatal testicular cancer to win one more race.
Not long after these succession of victories and to his utter disappointment, the legend became the subject of a doping allegation. John was devastated. He took the kind of gut punch that obtains when the Spider-Man in you life comes crashing. He was in disbelief and decided thenceforth that any report unflattering of Armstrong got to be someone else’s fault.
My colleague was shocked that her very informed and highly regarded husband deliberately chose not to face the truth. ”He would weave his own story to deflect 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 Trump, the arrowhead of the conspiracy theory finally acknowledged that Obama was born in the US, there were still a good number of Americans who despite the fact that Mr. Obama showed his birth certificate in both the short and long form chose to believe that he was born outside of the US.
These were the same group that likely would dismiss Trump’s famous ”grab ’em by the….” comment as boys being boys. If you can’t blot it out of your reality, the second option is to water it down some.
Boys being boys for sure sounded way better than a sex predator. Of course, without the video clip they would have sworn with their lives that the fake news media were out again to get Mr.Trump.
In those two scenarios ,believing in anything else meant the individual would have had to deconstruct a whole lot of what was built in the mind over the years. You can call it living in an alternative universe or gaslighting but that’s just good old human nature. Most of us are all like that except when one makes a conscious effort to get rid 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 you may not acknowledge. 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 good 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 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 utilize a complex algorithms that tracks our behaviour and use that to figure out individual bias in order to predict behaviour.
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 to target blacks but it was nonetheless a very effective propaganda tool. They knew exactly what to say and sow a 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.
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. The result was that in many states that Trump ended up winning, black turn out was an all-time low. The black voters 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 is the 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 everyday. 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 shares a controversial essay or an inciting video, first do your best to verify if the source is 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 important role you play in shaping our world.
A better world for us today and that which we hope to pass on to our children.
So help us God
*Osmund Agbo MD, FCCP writes from Houston