Dueling Narratives and Disinformation Fly Online During LA Protests

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Disinformation and Dueling Narratives Fly Online During LA Protests

As protesters faced-off against police in Los Angeles over the past few days, a parallel struggled has raged online. People took to the streets Friday after ICE agents launched raids across LA County and swept up undocumented immigrants looking for work or showing up for scheduled meetings and hearings. From subReddits to TikTok to the White House’s official social media feeds, two versions of reality have since dueled for hearts and minds, as the WaPo described:

Amateur videographers and online creators shared some of the mayhem’s most-talked-about videos and images, often devoid of context and aimed at different audiences. Clips showing officers firing less-lethal rounds at an Australian journalist or mounted police directing their horses to stride over a sitting man fueled outrage on one side, while those of self-driving Waymo cars on fire and protesters holding Mexican flags stoked the other…

“If you’re on the pro-ICE side of this, you need to find visual images of these protests that look really scary, look really dangerous because that’s what’s going to draw human attention,” [researcher Laura Edelson said]. But if “you don’t think that ICE should be taking moms away from their families and kids, you’re going to have a video that starts with a crying child’s face.”

Donald Trump surely hoped that sending phalanxes of federal agents into a city like LA, where a third of the population was born in another country, would create a blast of shocking images and video that would bring Americans to his side. And he’s already used the violent acts of a relatively small number of people in the crowd to bring in the National Guard and the U.S. Marines. But polling so far does not show the public rallying to Trump’s view in big numbers, and perhaps images and video from the scene have played a role:

The protests have become the biggest spectacle yet of the months-long online war over deportations, as Trump allies work to convince Americans that the issue of undocumented immigration demands aggressive action. But immigrant families and advocates have also been winning attention, and seeking public support, through emotional clips of crying families grappling with removal orders, anti-ICE gatherings and young children in federal custody.

Videos have a particular power to bring people to react from the heart, since they can take them face-to-face with events in a way that words and even photos cannot. As Brookings researcher Darrell West put it, they can “encapsulate the emotion of the moment.” They can also profoundly distort what’s happening on the ground, as the NYT noted today:

The flood of falsehoods online appeared intended to stoke outrage toward immigrants and political leaders, principally Democrats.

They also added to the confusion over what exactly was happening on the streets, which was portrayed in digital and social media through starkly divergent ideological lenses. Many posts created the false impression that the entire city was engulfed in violence, when the clashes were limited to only a small part…At the same time, false images spread to revive old conspiracies that the protests were a planned provocation, not a spontaneous response to the immigration raids.

In this universe, a pallet of Malaysian bricks becomes a George Soros plot to arm demonstrators, while a still image from Blue Thunder becomes an action shot from the scene. Roy Scheider is on the case! The Russkies have been joining the content-sharing fun, of course, since their digital agents rarely miss an opportunity to tapdance on a rival country’s raw nerves. But as usual, we’ll surely do most of the damage ourselves:

“[Jeremy Lee] Quinn, who also documented Black Lives Matter marches and the U.S. Capitol riots, said viewers on the left and right treat viral videos like weapons in their arsenal…’You end up with a far-right ecosystem that thrives on these viral moments,’ Quinn said.”

We will not escape this dynamic soon, if ever. Dueling visions of reality will become weapons in every political and cultural fight we wage, and the situation will not improve as AI gets better at warping the world in realistic ways. Fact-checking won’t help much, either:

Disinformation in situations like these spreads so quickly and widely that efforts to verify facts cannot keep up, said Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, an advocacy organization that studies the intersection of media, technology and the law. She described it as part of “a much longer effort to delegitimize peaceful resistance movements.”

“Information warfare is always a symptom of conflict, stoked often by those in power to fuel their own illiberal goals,” she said. “It confuses audiences, scares people who might otherwise have empathy for the cause and divides us when we need solidarity most.”

Mission accomplished! In a country divided not just about opinions but facts, the only way to counter disinformation seems to be to share our own messages far, wide and often. Disinformation has a real advantage on that front, since you can spin a truly enticing narrative when you don’t have to worry about the truth. It’s more fun that way, too:

– cpd