When political misinformation is an unwelcome guest at the holiday table

Marketplace Tech

American Public Media

Technology, News

4.6 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 November 2024

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s an interesting time for many in the U.S. Some people feel great about President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House, while others don’t. This week, people from both sides are sitting down together for Thanksgiving dinner. And while it’s one thing to ignore a family member’s social media posts or online rants, that can be a bit more challenging face-to-face, sometimes leading to awkward conversations about beliefs, truth and misinformation. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke to Whitney Phillips, assistant professor of digital platforms and ethics at the University of Oregon, about how to navigate awkward conversations this holiday season.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Understanding the emotional side of misinformation.
0:05.4	From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.
0:08.1	I'm Kimberly Adams.
0:18.5	Well, election season is finally and officially over with just about all the votes having been counted and all the closest congressional races done. And Donald Trump is preparing to take the White House in January with Republicans preparing to take the majority in both the House and the Senate. Now, some people feel really good about this outcome, while others feel really badly.
0:42.9	And this week, many people from both sides of the spectrum are going to sit down together at the table for Thanksgiving dinner.
0:50.3	Now, in anticipation of some potentially awkward conversations with friends and family this holiday season, we've invited Whitney Phillips onto the show to talk about how to navigate these moments.
1:01.2	Whitney is an assistant professor of digital platforms and ethics at the University of Oregon.
1:06.3	Whitney, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Now we're going to get to those conversations in a moment,
1:11.7	but first in the weeks since the election, there have been murmurs of misinformation online
1:18.3	with some people, both supporters of winning and losing candidates, talking about inconsistencies
1:25.5	in the vote count. What makes these narratives so appealing?
1:29.6	One of the main reasons that people end up believing conspiracy theories or seeking out
1:34.8	conspiratorial content is when an outcome doesn't match up with the expectations for that.
1:41.1	And so Harris supporters in particular, given sort of idea that it was going to
1:46.4	potentially be a coin toss, but that it would be very close. And then it ended up not being,
1:51.4	I mean, it wasn't a landslide, but Trump won decisively and quickly that didn't compute with
1:56.4	what the expectations were. And so people who were spending a lot of their time online trying to find
2:01.3	answers were either seeking out some sort of confirmation or explanation for this apparent
2:08.0	discrepancy, or they were just spending a lot of time online trying to just make sense of it
2:14.8	generally, and then we're being fed things. So anytime there's confusion
2:18.8	about an outcome or it doesn't line up with what the expected outcome would be, you can expect
2:24.3	to see these kinds of narrative swirling, particularly for people who are spending a lot of
	...

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