How the contrived panic over Haitian immigrants hijacked our algorithms -- and our brains

[usonian]

This is what cognitive warfare looks like.
Caroline Orr Bueno
Sep 14, 2024
https://weaponizedspaces.substack.com/p/how-the-contrived-panic-over-haitian

My take: This is WAR, and you can win BY NOT SHOWING UP.
Flood the internet with the REAL issues, when everyone is watching crackpots use Trump as target practice. (and failing)


Emphasis mine:

Of course, people believing false things about immigrants is nothing new, nor is the general disregard that much of the country now shows for things like facts and reality. But the problem we’re facing isn’t just that people believe things that aren’t true. That’s a problem, clearly, but it’s not the only one. Misinformation also hijacks our national discourse and sucks up all the oxygen in the room so that important conversations end up getting derailed and set aside. When we spend so much of our time and attention talking about what’s not true, we end up not talking about things that are true — and often very consequential. You’d be hard pressed to find a more striking example of this than what we saw during Tuesday night’s presidential debate.

During this week’s presidential debate, abortion was the top-searched political issue in 49 out of 50 states, according to data from Google Trends. It’s not entirely shocking that abortion is top of mind for many people, given that it was already a top election-related issue before the Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade and ended federal protections surrounding a woman’s right to choose. People recognize that abortion rights in this country are on the line, and are understandably concerned about who the next president will be and how that will impact access to abortion — yet, despite the fact that abortion was the number one issue searched in 49 states during the debate, the number one issue searched overall was not abortion. Rather, it was immigration — but it wasn’t just immigration policies in general that people were searching for; they were searching for immigration in relation to the inflammatory lies about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eating people’s pets. That’s Ohio standing alone in red in the graphic below.



...

This is the consequence of allowing misinformation to dominate our discourse and drive the discussion instead of allowing our priorities to drive it. And this is just one example on one evening during one election season. Think about how many other issues are being displaced by misinformation, and how many conversations are not being had because instead of talking about the issues that are affecting the majority of the people in this country, we end up being forced to talk about things that don’t actually affect anyone at all, and rather than using this time during election season to talk about very real issues with very real consequences, we’re stuck in a loop of talking about what’s not real and allowing our attention to be consumed by what’s not true.

...

As we have seen over the past several years, one of the products of this cycle is the normalization of absurd disinformation, conspiracy theories, hate speech, and inflammatory rhetorical styles, including stochastic terrorism. Our constant and often unfiltered exposure to this content actually changes our brains — or at least the way our brains work. And that’s exactly what it’s designed to do. Disinformation narratives like this one are crafted to impair your decision-making by steering you away from rational, deliberative information processing, and ushering you straight into the peripheral processing route, which is the one we use when we make reflexive, often unconscious judgments based on emotions, biases, and mental shortcuts (called heuristics). This is achieved by coaxing you to engage with highly divisive topics, then undermining your ability to process incoming information about that topic by tying it to related unconscious biases — a type of cognitive attack that hijacks our brains and exploits our cognitive vulnerabilities in order to manipulate our own internal deliberative processes, as well as those of our society. This is the very essence of cognitive warfare, and it’s being used against us with devastating success.

[Clouds Passing]

1. They really don't want the pro-slavery Project 2025 taking anymore media time

So they must invent hysteria inducing junk.

[usonian]

2. They're monopolizing media with pets and dodge-bullets. Abortion access should be number 1.

And visibility for their Spanish Inquisition Project 2025.

[Clouds Passing]

3. Rec for "Spanish Inquisition Project 2025"