Let’s face it: bullshit is everywhere. Especially when it comes to what people say, it is not that rare to hear people blabbing about things they do not know. Sometimes, it could also be us. Sometimes, we hear someone backing up their words with such good arguments that we don’t even doubt they might not be true, and next time it could be us using those same arguments just because we heard them before. That happens especially when things said are already echoing our previous idea. Who doesn’t love to be right? And to have someone else confirming that also?

Other times, we immediately detect the bullshit, because we know other reliable sources that tell the opposite, or because it is so unreal that we at least doubt the truth of the statement.

Of course, if we’re talking nonsense on irrelevant matters there’s no harming anyone, but things can get a lot more serious. If newspapers are spreading nonsense, or if politicians are telling bullshit – and if they do, they usually do that during elections time – it can affect many more people in their real life. Spreading misinformation is nothing new. During past centuries people peddling hogwash were called in many imaginative ways: taradiddler and ultracrepidarian are for sure amongst the funniest. No doubt, misinformation is still very much present and it is the most dangerous when it comes from politicians. Today we call it fake news.

Fake news: what’s behind?

If fake news is potentially everywhere and said even by important political actors, we better start understanding how they work, why they work, and how to deal with them. A lot of insights from a lot of different disciplines can come to help us, from psychology to philosophy to many others, but I will try to take some insights from what I know a bit better, argumentation theory.

We are not going to look too deeply into the many various approaches of argumentation, but let’s break down some basic concepts to understand better how they can be useful for us. First of all, argumentation theories are applied to argumentative products (texts, speeches etc) – so to anything that is a claim and that is supported by an argument (or a number of them). Usually, when people use arguments to support what they say, it is because they think someone may not agree with them. For this reason, they try to convince and persuade the others, using different arguments and strategies. According to argumentation theories – they might differ but they all agree on that – there are valid arguments and invalid or fallacious ones: these last ones are in fact called fallacies. Fallacies can be of many different kinds: an argument can be logically invalid, it can be fallacious because it draws general consequences from too few examples or because it is based on a personal attack on the opposite party.

When it comes to politicians, oftentimes it is easier to study how fallacies – also used to back up fake news – are used by populist politicians. That is, because their power mostly comes exactly from a particular use of arguments. That is not to say, of course, that populist politicians are the only ones spreading fake news and that they do that all the time, but it is a fact that much of their policy is grounded on ideas that are commonly thought to be true or convenient from their audience but that can be in fact false.

Some populist politicians have been studied in their use of arguments to find out that they have similar patterns. For instance, a study on Matteo Salvini (actually the vice PM of Italy), Donald Trump (we all know who he is) and Jair Bolsonaro (the former Brasilian PM) showed how they used similar fallacies and “emotive words” in their tweets. And the comparison with Joe Biden’s tweets also showed that populist politicians use certain types of fallacies and emotive words much more.

What this study found out is that Trump, Salvini and (a bit less) Bolsonaro used a lot of the so-called ad hominem arguments, combining it with victimization. That’s for sure a powerful match: ad hominem is an argument in which a personal attack is carried out. It may sound like: “You (politician of the opposing party) cannot rule this great country because you cannot even fry an egg”. You may indeed not know how to fry an egg, but that does not for sure mean that you cannot be at the government! That is then sometimes combined with victimization, something along the lines of “They are trying to stop me. But they do that because they know that I am actually right, they’re scared of me”.

What we can learn, as readers, is that when we see someone backing up his or her position with an argument as such, something may be not completely true; or at least, their claim may be a bit less strong of what they say it to be.

Why is fake news so effective?

«They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats.»

That’s one of the most recent and widespread piece of fake news in Trump’s mouth, during his last election campaign. I bet almost everyone thought that it was not true, but it was however a claim that ran around the globe. Someone, especially amongst his most fervent supporters, probably believed it. Someone else may have thought it could be true. How so? How could a running candidate say something like this? How could it be – as fake news in general – so effective?

Various aspects come into the picture to explain why these pieces of fake news have such a hold on people. Cognitive biases are the response from the psychology field. People acquire beliefs when they are exposed repeatedly to them, when they resonate with their previous knowledge and when they are commonly accepted by their peers. People like it when something they hear or read confirms an opinion they already had before. That is something almost everyone knows. Trump’s claim on Haitian immigrants in Springfield eating dogs, is exactly this: pet-eating immigrants was already in the past a widespread political trope used by white politicians against immigrants, especially from Asian descent. So even if probably the majority of people did not believe Trump, what he said was not so far away from a quite spread racial prejudice that may have somehow echoed things already heard of and accepted.

In this case, argumentation did not play a big role, since the claim itself was effective or his racial prejudice root – the only argument Trump actually did put forward for this claim was in fact that he saw that on TV, not a strong argument to say the least. But there are other cases in which argumentation plays an important part to make the claim acceptable. Especially when argumentation is made from examples that are intentionally portrayed as emotionally loaded. Let’s stick to Trump. Everyone knows he is devoted to anti immigration policies and to support that he often makes examples of crimes committed by immigrants, or claiming that they want to go to America to steal jobs. For many, this may seem a worn-out rhetoric, but it is still very effective, precisely because it appeals to deep emotions, like fear. No one wants crime rates to get higher, no one wants to live in an unsafe place. Politically, it is the easiest way to find a scapegoat, ready to be blamed for everything that doesn’t work in the Country. That is how more subtle fake news also works, especially when it comes to statistics and links between phenomena (as in immigration and crime rates, which is a connection made and spread all over the World).

In the end, fake news usually is so effective because it is the easiest thing to believe and it creates an evil opposing figure to blame for things that we don’t like in our societies.

Detect to protect

So, bullshits are out there, we got that. How to protect ourselves from that? Based on what we have seen, there are a few steps we can take to detect fake news and protect ourselves from them:

1. If someone is smearing someone else out of nowhere, it is not a good sign
2. Check out stories that play to much with deep emotion
3. Doubt claims that are not backed up by good sources, reasonable arguments
4. Don’t immediately accept as true news that confirms your own opinions – that is not a standing alone reason for it to be true!

There are for sure other steps and other things that can be done, but 4 is the maximum of bullet points the average person focuses on when reading a list.

Or is it not? Check it out and tell us if that’s bullshit or not!