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So I wrote this end-of-year thing for @NiemanLab, and one thing I didn't put in it was an underlying revelation about terminology, particularly about narratives and claims and how we talk about them, and how that tends to mask some important patterns. https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/12/2021s-misinformation-will-look-a-lot-like-2020s-and-2019s-and/
Basically, you have claims, which in misinfo are often purported/real events + a framing. So "The democrats snuck a box of manufactured ballots into a Detroit polling location to goose the vote on election night 2020" is a claim.
Event-based claims have the things you learn in school when you first started thinking about telling stories about events: who, what, when, where, why, and how.
Who: Dems
What: snuck in votes
When: election night
Where: Detroit
Why: to ballot-stuff
How: using a box/suitcase
Who: Dems
What: snuck in votes
When: election night
Where: Detroit
Why: to ballot-stuff
How: using a box/suitcase
And then you have narratives. Narratives are bigger, and tie together many claims into an understandable pattern.
E.g. "Democrats wait until the tallies are in, decide where they need more votes, then add them in a variety of ways" ties together the statistics "vote dump" story, with the boxes of ballots story, with the "people are stealing mail-in ballots" story.
People use "narrative" a lot of different ways, but for me at least, that level of analysis is the most useful use of the term, a way to see very different events as part of a larger story. It's not a theme, it's not a claim.
But then there is this other level, in between narrative and claim, that sometimes gets called narrative and sometimes gets called claim, but is actually neither.
In linguistic terms we'd call it the "type" of which the claim is actually the "token". And what it is is the claim with the when and where (and maybe the who) removed, but the what, how, and why intact, though a little fuzzy around the edges.
So these proto-claims, or whatever you want to call them keep the parts that aren't grounded in a place and time...
What: snuck in votes
Why: to ballot-stuff
How: using a box/suitcase
What: snuck in votes
Why: to ballot-stuff
How: using a box/suitcase
And just slap together a new who, when, and where
Who: Dems
Where: Boca Raton
When: 2018
Who: Dems
Where: Boca Raton
When: 2018
(If you want, you can think of these events with the who/where/when stripped out as memes, I'm not using that term because of terminological confusion there as well)
Lots of times these proto-claims are tied to a lot of true events. For instance, the thing where everyone was sharing ballots mailed to dead people and the core
Who: Dems
What: Mailing ballots to dead people
Why: to create ballot-stuffing opportunities
How: fake voter lists
Who: Dems
What: Mailing ballots to dead people
Why: to create ballot-stuffing opportunities
How: fake voter lists
just gets mapped onto a new who/where with each posting (which is, again, basic memetics). This is nicely participatory because it's basically ice bucket challenge, the only thing that changes is who and where.
Anyway, looked at the narrative level, things never change much, but aren't really actionable. And looked at at the claim level things are actionable, but ever-changing, and everything must be independently verified, it's just a flood of the new.
But looked at at the proto-claim level (and I know hardcore memetic warfare people are going to make me use their terms, eventually) things are specific enough that we have a pretty good inkling of plausibility but general enough that they're stable entities over time.
These are on the level of "Man wakes up after date in bathtub, and finds a scar learns kidney was removed". It's a new friend of a friend in each story, it happened in Miami one time, the next time in Mexico. And maybe *this time it's true*
But to make decisions about a tale that is a proto-claim that has been circulating around in 200 different variants, all false, you don't say "Oh, so how are we going to get down to Mexico and check the hotel surveillance", at least to start.
I mean, that's the height of dumb, right? Oh, all the other stories were wrong, but this one was about Fred! You tell whoever is telling you this that this is an old story that's been going around since at least the 1990s and has been debunked repeatedly. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/youve-got-to-be-kidneying/
Anyway, part of the point of the Nieman piece is that in between the level of the narrative and the claim there is something primordial (which again, the memetics people will tell me the name of) something with time/place stripped out but still evaluable.
And if you have any hope of beating this problem where bad actors can open up 20 false claims by breakfast and then it takes hours to track them down, you have to work at that level.
Thus ends my twitter break, but read the piece, it's less confusing than this thread and you'll like it. https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/12/2021s-misinformation-will-look-a-lot-like-2020s-and-2019s-and/
