Technology, lies, and your brain

Some time back PSFK linked to this essay, The Participatory Decepticon, which I’ve only now gotten around to reading. Basically, Jamais Cascio muses on the possibilities that arise from not just ubiquitous video technology — but also increasingly ubiquitous video-manipulation technology: “The crafting of political videos documenting candidate insults and errors that never happened.”

There are more than enough audio recordings out there of most major political candidates to allow political pranksters/”dirty tricksters” to make that candidate say just about anything; the cameraphone and flash video media offer insufficient clarity to be able to see if a candidate’s mouth is truly saying the words he or she seems to be saying.

Imagine a faked “Macaca Moment,” for instance.

“Such a deception wouldn’t stand for very long,” Cascio writes, “but would almost certainly last long enough set off a wave of furious blog posts and mainstream media attention.”

This reminded me of an NYT op-ed piece not so long ago titled “Your Brain Lies to You,” on the subject of “source amnesia,” and why it is that 10 percent of Americans somehow still believe that Barack Obama is Muslim. “Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer,” the authors write, “people often later remember it as true.”

A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength. This could explain why, during the 2004 presidential campaign, it took some weeks for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry to have an effect on his standing in the polls.

Even if they do not understand the neuroscience behind source amnesia, campaign strategists can exploit it to spread misinformation. They know that if their message is initially memorable, its impression will persist long after it is debunked. In repeating a falsehood, someone may back it up with an opening line like “I think I read somewhere” or even with a reference to a specific source.

In other words, if it does turn out that someone manages to get a phony video “out there,” debunking it might be more problematic that we’d assume.

And while I generally take a dim view of predictions, when I think about this one, it’s hard to imagine that it won’t happen before too long.