Economist Writing Every Day

For those who missed the big story last week, it turns out that Blake Lively’s director and co-star, Justin Baldoni, feared that he was going to be publicly outed as an abuser and subsequently instructed his publicity team to start a preemptive disinformation campaign against her. The story is hot because the cache of subpoenaed text messages are the seeming definitition of “overwhelming evidence” and “receipts”, the victim is a prominent woman, and the activities in question are heinous. Which is all true, but I’m interested because 1) it seems to have really, honestly worked and 2) is was relatively cheap and easy, all to an extent that even surpised the alleged perpetrators.

We all know about Russian disinformation efforts at this point, but those are are the products of a government agency. They have enormous resources at their disposal. This internet campaign to pre-emptively attack and discredit a woman who is the (alleged) victim of gratuitous harassment was carried out by a small band of publicists, agents, and their team of assistants. This isn’t a billion dollar operation. This isn’t even a million dollar operation. This is a project carried out over cronuts and text messages by middle brow entertainment business aspirants looking to climb the ladder in between improving their scores at Orange Fitness.

What I’m saying is that disinformation scales faster and easier than I would have ever guessed and I don’t think I’m alone. A couple reddit threads, instagram and tik-tok posts, and tweets, all posted by accounts run and backpocketed by the publicity agency for precisely these purposes, and within hours the world has turned on a single human in a wave of disapprobation. A woman, you’ll recall, who had done absolutely nothing that would seemingly be able to give traction to public shaming.

This is a massive technology shift. If there is a final lesson to 2024, it’s we don’t know what’s real and what’s manufactured news. Worse still, those who would proclaim to be the least trusting are generally those that are the easiest to mislead, falling down endless rabbit holes of conspiracy theory and fabrication. Those conspiracy theories are fun to laugh at (and I suspect even more fun to believe with your whole heart), but I don’t think conspiracy theory falsehoods are the only plague going forward. It’s going to be joined by a growing trend of informational nihilism, an inabiilty to trust any news or information source.

It’s not that hard for me to imagine a swirling, vicious online discourse between left and right wingers, each fully enveloped in their cozy echo chambers of conspiracy and confirmation bias, while their more moderate (and numerous) peers simply drop out of the conversation entirely, unable to see the bits and bytes flying back and forth as anything more than unverifiable noise.

What happens to a democracy when the median voter believes in nothing?