"In that time, I've witnessed a glaring decline in not only my students' ability to discern fact from fiction, but also a lack of interest in doing so," Keck said. "Sadly, I feel larger society is demonstrating the same phenomenon."
Academics and politicians studying the use of disinformation tactics used by both foreign actors and groups in the United States, worry about how Americans cannot trust the information they obtain, and cannot therefore trust the electoral process. Some believe, and have said openly, that democracy is under threat from active disinformation campaigns that may originate overseas but are spread by people in every state, including Connecticut.
Though Matthew Schmidt, associate professor of national politics at the University of New Haven, said the tension inherent in a democracy is not a new phenomenon, the current "concern about the future of the republic" is similar to concerns raised during the Civil War, "and that could well be the case here."
"You have to have, as best you can, an educated public in order to have a republic," he said. "That's always been the case. This is the tension in democracy and the fact of that tension isn't new. What's potentially is new in the American case is the intensity of that tension in the electorate."
But the lines of education have become blurred and perhaps difficult to distinguish, as Sen. Richard Blumenthal said. There are, he said, conscious, coordinated efforts to use disinformation to create distrust in the electoral process.
"Democracy is definitely at peril because of disinformation, particularly coming from our foreign adversaries like Iran, China and Russia, who are exploiting an open society, which democracy is," he said. "We're also at risk of violent extremism within our nation as never before, and those violent extremists are fueled by disinformation and spread it."
"What happens now, is fake Russian fake accounts might seed disinformation, which then is picked up and pushed by Americans because it appeals to their partisan interests," Blumenthal said. "So, they'll plant the seed with a fake image or impersonation, which then local groups will amplify, or Russians might amplify disinformation created by Americans."
For example, artificial intelligence company OpenAI disclosed recently that Iran was using its product, ChatGPT, to generate articles on U.S. politics and global events, "published on five websites that posed as both progressive and conservative news outlets."
The goal, OpenAI said, was to further polarize the voting public, to destabilize the American electoral process both this November and beyond.
That concern is felt by members of both major political parties. State Republican party chairman Ben Proto said, "it worries me."
"As a political operative, it worries me, but more importantly as a citizen of this country, we pride ourselves on our democratic processes," he said. "It worries me and it's scary, and people need to be more engaged with what they're reading and what they're watching on their phones and on their tablets and on their computers," he said.
THE END OF DEMOCRACY
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong does not believe we've passed some point of no return, though he does say that things have changed.
"We're not in a post-democratic or post-fair election world, but we have to adapt," he said. "I do think that people are still attracted to the truth and value the truth."
Politicians and their supporters have always and will always stretch the truth, but with the rise of deep fakes and artificial intelligence, and coordinated disinformation campaigns run by foreign adversaries attempting to affect elections, the electoral process will have to change.
"They've definitely changed the way the elections are going to run," Tong said. "They've definitely created volatility that we've never seen before."
Tong is not a fatalist. He said "we can't just throw our hands up," even though there's "a temptation to say there's nothing we can do about it."
The law, he said, needs to change to allow for social media. News organizations that build trust and educate rather than divide must survive.
"I think the issue of disinformation, misinformation has been around since mankind learned how to speak," Proto said. "With the advent of social media, it became easier to put that misinformation or disinformation in front of people. Everybody in the world today is, quote-unquote, 'a reporter.' I can put something on Instagram or on X or WhatsApp, or TikTok and make it look like somebody said something, and it suddenly gets picked up and off we go to the races."
American democracy has contended with misinformation before, and polarization and yellow journalism, and it's continued to limp along.
"It's harder for people to determine who are the trustworthy voices," Tong said. "And, of course, biases draw them to one voice or another, but the idea that journalism somehow in a previous age was pure and objective is, as you know, just not true."
NO DIFFERENCE THAN THE PAST
Tong called it an "end of history question," asking rhetorically if disinformation will result in the end of American democracy.
"The answer is, of course, no," he said. "We've been in really dark places before: the Holocaust, slavery. The founding era, just in terms of political discourse, was ugly. If you take a step back and think about how many presidents have been shot or assassinated, it's a staggeringly large number over 200 years-plus. Volatility, violence, hatred, unconscionable, unspeakable acts by people against other people. All of this is not new to us."
Mackenzie Lockhart , a post-doctoral researcher at Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies, said he believes that not much has changed, despite the rise of artificial intelligence and foreign disinformation campaigns.
"I'm not quite so much of a pessimist as that," he said. "I think that for a long time, we've been living in a democracy where a ton of voters are ill-informed or misinformed about what's going on."
For example, Lockhart said when Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson in 1952, there were Ike supporters saying that he was the only Christian to ever run for office in the United States, which was obviously untrue.
The difference, he said, is that we're now able to verify the information we receive.
"I think that there's a concern we've — for the last 20 years, maybe 30 years — been living in this sort of golden age of people being able to get their own information and check whether what they learn is true or not," he said. "But for the 200 years before the Internet, voters were presented with information by their social network, by what they read in books or what they read in magazines, in the news, and they just had to take that all at face value."
"There was no ability for people to check and yet, things continued to move along," he said.
That doesn't mean it's not "frightening," that "now we could have deepfakes that are completely indistinguishable from real videos of politicians saying one thing or another," Lockhart said.
But Lockhart said that is not truly different from the pre-digital age, when anyone could say anything and the means to verify it was not in your pocket.
"I don't think that that's all that different from 50 years ago, when I could tell you that the president said something and you would have no way of verifying whether that was true or not," he said. "I'm not sure that it's entirely novel, even if it is pretty frightening."
Lockhart believes democracy will continue perhaps as it always has, with people casting votes based on some truths and some untruths.
"I think that voters have long been misinformed and ill-informed, and yet democracy has sort of kept going," he said.
For Keck, though, the difference between the current political climate and that of previous generations is social media.
"When more than half of the population refer to their social media account for news, the majority of news consumers are receiving a news agenda specifically curated to assuage their personal tastes via algorithms," he said. "Consequently, the political divide is the greatest I've seen in my lifetime."
©2024 The Hour, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
