When the Francis Scott Key bridge collapsed, it showed how noxious news pollution remains on social media

If Francis Scott Key had been alive today to post his lyric `O! say can you see’ on any of our anarchistic social media platforms, it would be followed by an immediate torrent of misinformation sowing distrust and division about what Key had seen and whether what he saw `by the dawn’s early light’ was fake news. Thanks to the incentives of our major social media platforms and the impunity with which their businesses operate, the ramparts of our defense against misinformation as a democracy are historically weak.

The Founders worried that divisive factionalism was a danger to democracy. In his farewell address, Washington warned about the “fatal tendency” of political parties to use artful deception to push their “incongruous projects” rather than engaging in deliberation to explore mutual interests. In Federalist No. 10, James Madison worried that strong partisanship would “inflame men with mutual animosity” disposing them to mischief that would lead them to ignore the common good. Today’s media manipulators, who use misinformation to stoke division and factionalism, work exactly as Washington and Madison feared they would. Only now, they use media technologies the Founders could have never imagined.

Just last week, the destruction of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore created a news cycle that is dramatizing the process by which media manipulators exploit the affordances and incentives of social media to sow distrust and stoke division. What we know is that a massive cargo ship lost power to its navigation system and–carried by the currents of the river–slammed into the support of the bridge, causing it to collapse. It was the perfect setup for media manipulators: a tragic event with lots of visual material that manipulators could use to reinforce and amplify their preferred sticky narrative.

Media manipulators never miss an opportunity to exploit a news event. Armed with dramatic footage of the bridge, they went to work across a variety of social platforms which, owing to a loophole in Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, operate with impunity in our media ecosystem. The “mischievous factions,” as Madison might say, used the affordances of social media, where algorithms amplify incendiary content because users engage with it, to spread news pollution about the accident. No matter what conspiracy theory media manipulators amplify, they cultivate distrust of reliable news sources and government institution. Indeed, one narrative that all media manipulators seem to promote is that people who trust legacy media or government institution are “NPC (non-player characters)” that act like sheep.

The ((Globalists)) did it

Media manipulators promote conspiracy theories that strengthen existing sticky narratives. They are sticky because any news event can be attached to them. One of the most durable sticky narratives in our news media ecosystem imagines that there is a secret cabal of wealthy puppet-masters behind every event pulling the strings. This narrative morphs in every variation, but features of it remain from its original Ur-story: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a misinformation campaign promoted by the Czar’s secret police to link Russian Revolutionaries to millennium-old antisemitic prejudice. This narrative fueled Right-Wing propaganda in the 1920s & 30s in Germany, France, and America, where Henry Ford used his wealth and media power to amplify it.

This durable anti-democracy narrative always features a puppet-master pulling the strings of purported democratic leaders, showing who is really in control of things. In the last couple of decades, when amplified by Right-Wing media manipulators, it has usually been George Soros playing the role.

As Soros has aged, the puppet-master figure has shifted to people involved in the World Economic Forum or to abstractions like “Globalists,” which serve as dog-whistles for subcultures that keep this sticky narrative alive as a structural feature of their world view. Social media posts linking the bridge collapse to “Globalists” were especially prevalent on Reddit, Telegram, Gettr, Truth Social and Rumble and often recirculated their way to X, which under Elon Musk has eliminated much of its trust and oversight teams in the name of his self-serving view “free speech” absolutism.

As the recent documentary The Truth vs Alex Jones showed, conspiracy profiteer Alex Jones knows how crucial spinning news into conspiracy is for his snake oil business. Last week, he spent considerable time covering the bridge collapse on Info Wars as the start of WW3 and spread his nostrum news further to his X followers, where he has been welcomed back despite the damage he has done. Lara Logan, fired by CBS for promoting Benghazi misinformation, went on former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast–distributed on multiple digital platforms with lax oversight so he can “flood the zone” with misinformation–to paint the event as a “brilliant, well-planned cyber-attack on critical infrastructure” by globalist forces that want to take down America. In her telling, the plans to destroy America that the bridge collapse revealed were started under Obama and have now resumed under Biden.

Showing who is pulling the strings is very important in how this ((Globalist)) narrative has morphed in its recent iteration. More recently, the standard Jewish puppet-master figure has been displaced onto figures like Barrack Obama.

Obama-as-puppet-master was the conspiratorial note that misinformation entrepreneur Matt Wallace sounded in his telling of the tale, distributed via X whose monetization framework – known as “creator Ads Revenue Sharing “- allows blue-check news polluters to profit with impunity.

As the sticky conspiracy theory stuck to the event, the news pollution spread through the right-wing media ecosystem on X and Rumble, amplified by misinformation entrepreneurs, bots and believers. Many of social media users whose feed surrounds them with noxious news added other details to the story to lure in those who had been hooked by the “((Globalist)) Obama did it” bait.”

White Power under siege

The “((Globalists)) did it” narrative was by no means the only sticky narrative deployed by news polluters. Another narrative often attached to available news items is the “great replacement theory,” which pushes the idea that “THEY” are trying to replace white people with non-white people as the locus of cultural power around the globe. In the American media system these days, this narrative often sticks to news events tangentially related to immigration and anything related to attempts to promote more equality in our democracy. Conspiracy entrepreneur Matt Walsh, a self-described “theocratic fascist and bestselling children’s author” with YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and X accounts followed by millions, seized on the social fact of Baltimore having a majority black population and a black mayor as an opening to stick his preferred narrative to the available news peg. He dedicated the opening monologue of his Daily Wire show, which follows the time-tested shock jock radio format of responding to news events with hot takes, to condemn Baltimore’s black mayor and MSNBC’s Joy Reid. Reid had done a segment on her show about the way the bridge crisis had been seized on by conspiracy theorists to promote a “grab bag of right-wing grievances,” including Diversity Equity and Inclusion.

There was ample reason for Reid to do this. One GOP Congressional candidate from Florida, like many others in the Right-Wing media ecosystem, posted a picture of the collapsed bridge captioned “DEI did this” on X. Another Tweet with over 26 million views from a prolific multiplatform conspiracy entrepreneur @iamyesyouareno - whose Tweets owner Elon Musk has spread to his 179 million followers - implied that the Mayor of Baltimore, Brandon Scott, elected with greater than 70% of the vote in the 2020 election, was ushered into office as part of some plan to undermine legitimate rule. Thousands of like-minded X users joined in to echo the sentiment and spread the news pollution, which to them proved that the “Great Replacement” narrative was real.

One of the most prolific news polluters of the last decade, Jack Posobeic, who famously pushed the Pizzagate conspiracy narrative that captured the fevered imagination of the right wing media ecosystem back in 2016, took the opportunity to stick his variation on the “Great Replacement” narrative to the news event.

Not wanting the “Great Replacement” narrative that he and like-minded influencers were amplifying to be drowned out by the “((Globalists)) did it” narrative, and knowing how engagement is crucial for monetization and amplification of misinformation, Matt Walsh attacked Jimmy Corsetti for being irresponsible and “undermining the cause” and the two engagement trolls began trading barbs and sowing distrust further.

Showing the power of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion sticky narrative, memes began to emerge that implied that Matt Walsh’s criticism of the “((Globalists)) did it” frame was confirmation of that the Cabal was indeed in control of everything, including Walsh. The more people disavowed this sticky Protocols narrative, the more they confirmed its truth.

Repetition, amplification, and competing narratives

Herein lies the problem with refuting conspiracy theories in the media ecosystem. Media manipulators attach news events to existing sticky narratives to maintain world views built on prejudice and lies. Just as each repetition strengthens the reach and appeal of such narratives, each attempt to refute them on the platforms where they circulate end up amplifying them. That’s why they are so sticky. And once the mess is out there, it’s hard to clean up.

In this case, the two competing narratives – both undermining faith the public trust in reliable news and democratic sovereignty – worked off one another. If the collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge and the subsequent torrent of misinformation that accompanied the event throughout the media ecosystem tells us anything, it’s that we are more vulnerable than ever to the firehose of falsehoods that mischievous communicators use to sow distrust and stoke factionalism to weaken our democracy. Such is always the end of media manipulators at home and abroad: to lower trust in the news and weaken faith in our collective capacity to deliberate together based on shared reality.

Until the Section 230 loophole that allows social media platforms to profit from polluting the news system with impunity is eliminated and social media platforms are held to account for the fraudulent content they publish, avoiding low trust platforms where professional media manipulators aggregate is the best way to avoid being over-exposed to news pollution. As we have advised before, if separating news from the noise is important to you, avoid perfidious platforms like X, Rumble, Truth Social and Gettr that hide contempt for their users behind a bad faith version free speech in the name of profit. –M.J.