Propaganda and Conspiracy: Part 2 - The Strategic Use of Bad Arguments for Propagandistic Purposes
Bad arguments are not merely the byproduct of sloppy thinking. We can often get tunnel vision, assuming the act of putting forward an argument signals commitment to an honest exchange with an interlocutor. In reality, there are often very subtle and strategic effects of advancing an argument. Bad arguments have a performative aspect to them. They’re built (or deployed) to achieve social effects like overwhelming, signaling group identity, or muddying the evidence landscape, rather than to establish truth. In other words, bad arguments can often serve broader propagandistic motivations. I first began thinking about the use of argument as an antidote to the bad thinking patterns that proliferated, seemingly unchecked, prior to the 2020 election cycle. This was around the same time studies in network science were being published that identified measurable polarization in social networks using Facebook user data. Motivated by this fact, my idea was that by teaching argumentation and c...