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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   4842 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 18, 2022

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Not exactly an original observation, but I keep bumping into a style of writing that includes "falsely" or "conspiracy theory" or similar verbiage every time that it mentions a given claim. This popped up for me again when I went to read the Wiki for the Republican New Hampshire Senate nominee, Don Bolduc:

For more than a year, Bolduc endorsed the false conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was rigged to favor Joe Biden.

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he continued to promote the false claim that the election was marred by fraud.[7]

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Bolduc is a 2020 presidential election denier.

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He endorsed the false claim, promoted by outgoing president Donald Trump,

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Throughout his campaign for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, Bolduc continued to promote the false claim that the election was stolen

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Bolduc continued to promote his false claims that the election was marred by fraud

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Bolduc has repeated COVID-19 falsehoods and conspiracy theories.

This is a really short article on this guy to have at least seven times that they keep repeating the same thing over and over. Yes, OK, got it, the official position is that there was definitely nothing wrong with the election and that all of The Science on Covid has always been completely correct and questioning it just being a conspiracy theorist repeating falsehoods, which are super false, and also disinformation. But given that this has been pounded over and over and over, why the written tic of repeating it so many times? There are lots of things that I think are obviously, factually wrong, but I don't feel the need to reiterate that literally every time I mention those things.

So what's driving this stylistic choice?

I think it's an attempt at avoiding the "backfire effect" - a recently viral idea that correcting misinformation effectively repeats it, so can end up reinforcing and spreading it, since brains may just remember they've "heard that before" rather than "heard that before and it was false" if the false part isn't as heavily hammered in. I first noticed this style of writing with Trump reporting, though backfire effect is older than that. I imagine for journalists the style has a signalling component too, for the Wikipedia article I see there was edit warring.

It was a topic in academia and clickholes as misinformation became perceived as a rising threat. Googling around suggests that one of the main original papers didn't reproduce.

I agree with the object level point that the election was not stolen, and find constantly mentioning it as "false" to be extremely weird and off-putting. I cannot imagine someone who disagrees with the object level point (or merely being on-the-fence) being convinced one bit.

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