The Fog of Public Opinion

Nearly half the US population now wants government to censor online "misinformation." And an even greater number of American citizens are totally on board with the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley taking it upon their august selves to censor everything that we see, hear, and read.

At least, that's according to a recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. But before you conclude that your fellow human beings have suddenly become the victims of an epidemic of  Authoritarian Personality Disorder, a different survey conducted at around the same time found, paradoxically enough, that most Americans also think that the government should do a lot more to rein in the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley.  

People are ambivalent, and confused, and they have been since the dawn of time. So what else is new? 

And polls are definitely skewed. The one just concluding that the American appetite for censorship has increased by a whopping 33 percent in just the past three years is, of course, directly linked to the Covid pandemic and the mixed messaging on vaccine efficacy emanating from both reliable ("scientific") and unreliable ("partisan") sources. Given that the definition of "government" itself is also so skewed along partisan and class lines, the results of this poll are probably unreliable on their face.

 But pollsters gotta poll. How else can our politicians serve the public? How else can our politicians get away with not only doing nothing to make people's lives better, but blaming all the divisive and divided people out there in the hinterland who, stupid as they are, were nonetheless smart enough to vote them into office? 

Manufactured public opinion stalemates are just what the pollster ordered to effectuate legislative gridlock, which in turn only helps the rich to grow richer and the poor to grow not only poorer, but as atomized and isolated and oppressed as is inhumanly possible.

The subliminal message in the recent Pew poll results is that only ignorant right-wingers are against benevolent censorship by the government-tech consortium of thought leaders. Educated liberals supposedly are the ones who want the discourse controlled. Ergo, if you don't like censorship, then it automatically follows that you are a Trump supporter, a Russian asset, a non-woke bigot, or any number of distasteful things you would never be caught dead being.  Everything must be deemed misinformation and disinformation until proven otherwise by a shadowy panel of unnamed experts.

 From the Pew Research Center's synopsis of the pro-censorship poll results:

Partisan views on whether technology companies should take such steps have also grown further apart. Roughly three-quarters of Democrats (76%) now say tech companies should take steps to restrict false information online, even at the risk of limiting information freedoms. A majority of Republicans (61%) express the opposite view – that those freedoms should be protected, even if it means false information can be published online. In 2018, the parties were closer together on this question, though most Democrats still supported action by tech firms.

Corporate Democrats and their acolytes began supporting censorship in droves just as Donald Trump took power and the paranoid Russiagate propaganda franchise dreamed up by the defeated Clinton team took off and infiltrated mainstream media with a vengeance. The ultra-right Republicans later wasted no time in weaponizing Covid, turning both the disease and its preventions and its treatments into another front in the perpetual Culture Wars. These dueling propaganda campaigns are at their cores an intra-oligarchic battle that simultaneously serves to entertain and terrorize the hapless spectators in the stands while effectively keeping their minds off such monstrous scandals as the orchestrated, deliberate, bipartisan lying about the war in Afghanistan.

The alleged majority of  people who want the "government" to stop the bad actors from spreading lies about vaccines and the pandemic should also ponder what late great muckraking journalist I.F. Stone had to say: “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.”

What with climate catastrophes, refugee catastrophes, health catastrophes, is it politically correct to say that government is collapsing, and disaster is already here? Maybe Pew can do another poll to see what people think about that, not to mention ask them what they're smoking these days.

And about that poll purporting to show that increasing numbers of people are craving the censorship drug to keep them feeling safe and secure? Read the fine print about their methodology, and you find that the 11,000-odd respondents are part of a pre-selected American Trends Panel (ATP) who have been recruited ("persuaded") over the years to take part in frequent and very time-consuming public opinion surveys. Although new people are recruited all the time, Pew acknowledges that 

 Another concern is that repeated questioning of the same individuals may yield different results than we would obtain with independent or “fresh” samples. If the same questions are asked repeatedly, respondents may remember their answers and feel some pressure to be consistent over time. The reverse is also a concern, as respondents might become “conditioned” to change their behavior because of questions asked previously. For example, questions about voting might spur them to register to vote. Respondents also become more skilled at answering particular kinds of questions. This may be beneficial in some instances, but to the extent it occurs, the panel results may be different from what would have been obtained from independent samples of people who have not had the practice in responding to surveys. Fortunately, research has detected no meaningful conditioning on the ATP.

So have the people who have been recruited also been subjected to polling to find out whether they've been overly conditioned by polling itself? Remember, there would have been plenty of cross-over between the respondents who wanted more censorship by Big Tech one week, but more reining in of Big Tech just a week or two before. 

I myself was once recruited by a polling outfit during the 2012 presidential campaign between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and I agreed to participate. It took a good half hour of my time. I remember answering "none of the above" to several multiple choice questions which I considered too artificially narrow in scope. I even asked the pollster whether my own ad hoc answers would be accepted. (They would not be.) When I said that I would not be voting for either Obama or Romney but would be casting my vote for Jill Stein, my answer was duly entered as "not voting."

But according to Pew, being subjected to continuous polling not only forces people to clamp down on their previous answers and opinions for the sake of consistency, it also nudges them to get out there and vote for the candidates they were so narrowly asked about!  I guess that makes me a polling failure. I am not an ideal candidate for the ATP Club.

How many people who don't automatically hang up the phone when a pollster invariably calls right in the middle of dinner are just plain lonely and desperate for the sound of another human voice? How many answer because they have a home and a phone in the first place, meaning they are minimally well off, have plenty of disposable time, and don't have to work two or three gigs just to make ends barely meet, and are therefore not much in favor of radical social policies outside of the parameters of the polling questions? How many respondents engage with pollsters just to mess with their heads? 

I don't know, but maybe they can do a poll about it.

Meanwhile, what are all my fellow Sardonickists thinking (or smoking)?