Fake news as lure for feeling

A story in the New York Times debunking three viral rumors about the 24 May 2022 Uvalde, Texas school massacre once again begs the question: why do people ‘believe’ such patent instances of misinformation? And what exactly is it that they ‘believe’ when they credit these and like lies circulating on such online platforms as Twitter, Gab, 4chan and Reddit? (Hsu et al, 2022). Though the content of these viral rumors could take many forms, the three at issue in this story exemplify the strategy with which we have become all too familiar during Donald Trump's presidency: sowing informational chaos to create confusion and let stick what sticks. The three rumors are: one, that the shooting was a staged ‘false flag’ operation designed to draw local law enforcement away from the border, allowing criminals and drugs free passage into the US; two, that the shooter was transgender and the massacre the result of hormone therapy; and three, that the gunman was an undocumented immigrant who crossed illegally into the US in order to carry out the attack.

I put the word ‘believe’ in scare quotes in order to highlight the liminal status that these and like rumors have for their ‘believers’ in relation to the issue of their truth or falsity. While these claims are clearly deliberate and repugnant instances of misinformation, their truth or falsity is not what is at stake in the ‘belief ‘ they garner, at least on the part of those not blatantly exploiting them for political positioning and gain. In this sense, they are instances – albeit particularly toxic and harmful ones – of what process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead alternately calls ‘propositions’, or more apropos here, ‘lures for feeling’. For Whitehead, propositions seek to elicit feeling rather than belief and, for this reason, they perfectly capture what is at issue in the efficacy of fake news: