Kate Starbird and her team<\/a>).<\/p>\nBut presenting both narratives equally can be a form of disinformation if one version more accurately depicts what happened (Imundo and Rapp, 2022). <\/p>\n
The Uneven Battle for the Overall Narrative<\/p>\n
Many of the news stories and social media posts have focused on each event. But in some cases, people work to connect these events to broader narratives or frames\u2014ways of seeing these killings as part of a bigger story about what is happening in the US. And it is here that our fractured news and social media systems most obviously differ by political orientation.<\/p>\n
People who present disinformation and conspiracy theory narratives see connections among distinct events. They present overall narratives. The advantage of having an overall narrative is that it makes it easier for people to make sense of and later remember the events. With the same underlying narrative used for each event, people will understand that narrative, remember the individual events, and more easily connect similar new events to the narrative.<\/p>\n
In contrast, most mainstream journalists work to present factual information about each news event they cover. They don\u2019t call all protestors violent or call them terrorists. They don\u2019t present all ICE officers as out of control. If you follow mainstream news journalists, they note that there have been two killings by ICE officers in Minnesota. They rarely make any deeper connection between the two events. Journalists generally treat these as isolated events without making a connection to a deeper narrative or frame.<\/p>\n
Without an overall narrative, each event is treated separately. When a new event occurs, it does not automatically bring to mind previous events since they are not connected to the same underlying story. People have to work to explain each event, rather than see all the events as having the same underlying narrative.<\/p>\n
A Lesson for Winning a Disinformation War<\/p>\n
My overall point is that there is a lesson here for how to win a disinformation war. People who spread disinformation are not worried about sharing correct facts. They repetitively use simple narratives. They want people to believe the underlying narrative for political or financial reasons.<\/p>\n
If you want people to believe and understand a different narrative based on factual information, you need to present simple and clear underlying narratives. You can present the facts about each event, but you also need to connect each new event to a clear underlying narrative. That will help people make sense of and remember the full set of events. <\/p>\n
Winning a disinformation war doesn\u2019t depend on presenting facts and true stories. Winning an information war depends on connecting better narratives that help people make sense of and remember the events and narratives. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A battle among competing narratives has developed in Minnesota. If you follow the news, you have undoubtedly seen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":395575,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-395574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395574\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/395575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}