The Internet Is Worse Than a
Brainwashing Machine
A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away.
By Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield
Illustration by Ben Kothe / The
Atlantic. Source: Samuel Corum / Getty.
January 6, 2025, 6
AM ET
Try to remember for a moment how you felt on January 6,
2021. Recall the makeshift gallows erected on the Capitol grounds, the tear gas, and the
sound of the riot shields colliding with hurled flagpoles. If you rewatch the
video footage, you might remember the man in the Camp
Auschwitz sweatshirt idling among the intruders, or the image of the Confederate flag flying in the Capitol Rotunda. The events of that day
are so documented, so memed, so firmly enmeshed in our recent political history
that accessing the shock and rage so many felt while the footage streamed in
can be difficult. But all of it happened: men and women smashing windows,
charging Capitol police, climbing the marbled edifice of one of America’s most
recognizable national monuments in an attempt to overturn the results of the
2020 election.
It is also hard to remember that—for at least a moment—it
seemed that reason might prevail, that those in power would reach a consensus
against Donald Trump, whose baseless claims of voter fraud incited the attack.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a longtime Trump ally, was unequivocal as he voted to
certify President Joe Biden’s victory that night: “All I can say is count me out. Enough
is enough.” The New York Post,
usually a pro-Trump paper, described the mob as “rightists who went berserk in
Washington.” Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which had generally
allowed Trump to post whatever he wanted throughout his presidency, temporarily
suspended his accounts from their service. “We believe the risks of allowing
the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too
great,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote then.
Yet the alignment would not last. On January 7, The
Atlantic’s David A. Graham offered a warning that proved prescient: “Remember what yesterday’s attempted coup at the U.S.
Capitol was like,” he wrote. “Very soon, someone might try to convince you that
it was different.” Because even before the rioters were out of the building, a
fringe movement was building a world of purported evidence online—a network of
lies and dense theories to justify the attack and rewrite what really happened
that day. By spring, the narrative among lawmakers began to change. The violent
insurrection became, in the words of Republican Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia,
a “normal tourist visit.”
David A. Graham: Don’t let
them pretend this didn’t happen
The revision of January 6 among many Republicans is
alarming. It is also a powerful example of how the internet has warped our
political reality. In recent years, this phenomenon has been attributed to the
crisis of “misinformation.” But that term doesn’t begin to describe what’s
really happening.
Think back to the original “fake news” panic, surrounding
the 2016 election and its aftermath, when a mixture of partisans and
enterprising Macedonian teenagers served up classics such as “FBI Agent, Who Exposed Hillary Clinton’s
Cover-up, Found Dead.” Academics and pundits endlessly debated the effect of
these articles and whether they might cause “belief change.” Was anyone
actually persuaded by these stories such that their worldviews or voting
behavior might transform? Or were they really just junk for mindless partisans?
Depending on one’s perspective, either misinformation posed an existential
threat for its potential to brainwash masses of people, or it was effectively
harmless.
But there is another, more disturbing possibility, one that
we have come to understand through our respective professional work over the
past decade. One of us, Mike, has been studying the effects of our broken
information environment as a research scientist and information literacy
expert, while the other, Charlie, is a journalist who has extensively written
and reported on the social web. Lately, our independent work has coalesced
around a particular shared idea: that misinformation is powerful, not because
it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in
light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so
much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine. A
rationale is always just a scroll or a click away, and the incentives of the
modern attention economy—people are rewarded with engagement and greater
influence the more their audience responds to what they’re saying—means that
there will always be a rush to provide one. This dynamic plays into a natural
tendency that humans have to be evidence foragers, to seek information that
supports one’s beliefs or undermines the arguments against them. Finding such
information (or large groups of people who eagerly propagate it) has not always
been so easy. Evidence foraging might historically have meant digging into a
subject, testing arguments, or relying on genuine expertise. That was the
foundation on which most of our politics, culture, and arguing was built.
The current internet—a mature ecosystem with widespread
access and ease of self-publishing—undoes that. As the mob stormed the Capitol
on January 6, the justification machine spun up, providing denial-as-a-service
to whoever was in need of it, in real time. Jake Angeli, the “QAnon Shaman,”
was an early focus. Right-wing accounts posting about the insurrection as it
unfolded argued that these were not genuine “Stop the Steal”–ers, because
Angeli didn’t look the part. “This is NOT a Trump supporter…This is a staged
#Antifa attack,” the pastor Mark Burns wrote in a tweet that showed Angeli in the Senate chamber—which was
then liked by Eric Trump. Other “evidence” followed. People
shared a picture of Angeli at a Black Lives Matter protest that
conveniently cropped out the QAnon sign he had been holding. People speculated that he was an
actor; others interpreted his tattoos as a sign that he was part of an
elite pedophile ring and therefore, in their logic, a Democrat.
The use of Angeli as proof that these people were not MAGA
was just one of many such scrambles. Within a few hours, MAGA influencers speculated that one protester’s tattoo was a hammer and sickle—proof of leftist agitation.
On TV, a Fox News host argued that Trump supporters don’t wear dark helmets, or use black backpacks, so the mob couldn’t be Trumpist.
Fairly quickly, the narrative emerged that the attack was a false flag, and the
media were in on it. Conspiracists pointed to the time stamp of an NPR
live blog that seemed to announce the riot
before it happened as evidence it was all preplanned by the “deep state” (and
neglected to note that the story, like many, had been updated and re-headlined
throughout the day, while retaining the time stamp of the original post). The
famous footage of a Capitol Police officer heroically leading the
mob away from the door to the Senate was “proof” in MAGA world
that Trump supporters were being coaxed into the Capitol by
the cops. Similarly, images of officers overwhelmed by rioters and allowing
them past the barricades were further proof that the insurrection had been
staged. The real organizer, they argued, was the deep state, abetted by
far-left groups.
For a while, the rush to gather evidence produced a
confusing double narrative from the right. In one telling, the riot was
peaceful—the Trump supporters in the Capitol were practically tourists. The
other highlighted the violence, suggesting that anti-fascists were causing
destruction. Eventually, the dueling stories coalesced into a more complete
one: Peaceful Trump supporters had been lured into the Capitol by violent
antifa members abetted by law-enforcement instigators working for the deep
state.
The function of this bad information was not to persuade
non-Trump supporters to feel differently about the insurrection. Instead, it
was to dispel any cognitive dissonance that viewers of this attempted coup may
have experienced, and to reinforce the beliefs that the MAGA faithful already
held. And that is the staggering legacy of January 6. With the justification
machine whirring, the riot became just more proof of the radical left’s
shocking violence or the deep state’s never-ending crusade against Trump. By
January 7, Google searches for antifa and BLM (which
had not played a role in the event) surpassed those for Proud Boys (which
had). In the months and years after the attempted coup, the justification
machine worked to keep millions of Americans from having to reckon with the
reality of the day. December 2023 polling by The Washington Post found that 25
percent of respondents believed that it was “definitely” or “probably” true
that FBI operatives had organized and encouraged the attack on the Capitol.
Twenty-six percent were not sure.
Conspiracy theorizing is a deeply ingrained human
phenomenon, and January 6 is just one of many crucial moments in American
history to get swept up in the paranoid style. But there is a marked difference
between this insurrection (where people were presented with mountains of
evidence about an event that played out on social media in real time) and, say,
the assassination of John F. Kennedy (where the internet did not yet exist and
people speculated about the event with relatively little information to go on).
Or consider the 9/11 attacks: Some did embrace conspiracy theories similar to
those that animated false-flag narratives of January 6. But the adoption of
these conspiracy theories was aided not by the hyperspeed of social media but
by the slower distribution of early online streaming sites, message boards,
email, and torrenting; there were no centralized feeds for people to create and
pull narratives from.
Read: I’m running out of
ways to explain how bad this is
The justification machine, in other words, didn’t create
this instinct, but it has made the process of erasing cognitive dissonance far
more efficient. Our current, fractured media ecosystem works far faster and
with less friction than past iterations, providing on-demand evidence for
consumers that is more tailored than even the most frenzied cable news
broadcasts can offer. And its effects extend beyond conspiracists. During this
past election season, for example, anti-Trump influencers and liberal-leaning
cable news stations frequently highlighted the stream of Trump supporters
leaving his rallies early—implying that support for Trump was waning. This
wasn’t true, but such videos helped Democratic audiences stay cocooned in a
world where Trump was unpopular and destined to lose.
Spend time on social media and it’s easy to see the demand
for this type of content. The early hours of a catastrophic news event were
once for sense-making: What happened, exactly? Who was behind it? What was the
scale? Now every event is immediately grist for the machine. After a mass
shooting, partisans scramble for evidence to suggest that the killer is MAGA,
or a radical leftist, or a disaffected trans youth. Last week, in the hours
after a mass murderer ran a car into civilians on Bourbon Street in New
Orleans, Trump began tossing out lies and speculation about the suspect,
suggesting that he was a migrant (information later arrived indicating that the
driver was a U.S. citizen and Army veteran). The tragedy and the chaos of its
immediate aftermath became an opportunity to attack Democrats about the border.
This reflex contributes to a cultural and political rot. A
culture where every event—every human success or tragedy—becomes little more
than evidence to score political points is a nihilistic one. It is a culture
where you never have to change your mind or even confront uncomfortable
information. News cycles are shorter, and the biggest stories in the world—such
as the near assassination of Trump last summer in Pennsylvania—burn bright in
the public consciousness and then disappear. The justification machine thrives
on the breakneck pace of our information environment; the machine is powered by
the constant arrival of more news, more evidence. There’s no need
to reorganize, reassess. The result is a stuckness, a feeling of being trapped
in an eternal present tense.
This stagnation now defines the legacy of January 6. Once
Republicans rewrote their side’s understanding of the insurrection (as a
nonevent at best and an example of deep-state interference at worst), they
dismissed all attempts for accountability as “Trump derangement syndrome.”
Senate Republicans blocked initial attempts at a bipartisan January 6
commission; then–Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called it a “purely political exercise” that would not
“uncover crucial new facts or promote healing.” During the congressional
hearings on the attempted coup, Fox News largely ignored the proceedings.
Trump, now president-elect, is pushing for an FBI probe of former Representative Liz Cheney
for her involvement in the commission. Its findings, released in a detailed
report, were immediately discredited by Republicans, who called it dishonest, politically motivated, and part of a
witch hunt. By Republicans’ cynical logic, the events of January 6 were
overblown, but are also ancient history. Only hysterical Democrats, obsessed
with taking down Trump, could not move on.
Democrats—and the two Republicans on the committee—were
right to seek accountability for January 6, but it proved exceedingly difficult
to do so in an information environment that is constantly stuck in the now and
the new. Trump and the MAGA media complex used the insurrection to
portray Democrats as a party of scolds, obsessed with the past, droning on
about democracy. The commission’s work was the sort of precise and methodical
case-building that is the opposite of the frenetic and immediate justification
engine. In an anti-institutional moment, the congressional truth-gathering process
read to some as academic, slow, even elitist. Many simply didn’t pay attention
to the process. Meanwhile, the right-wing ecosystem’s work to refute the
commission likely felt more improvised, authentic, and ultimately convincing to its followers.
When the Democratic Party chose to make the 2024 election
about Trump, his threat to the rule of law, and the “battle for the soul of
this nation,” as President Biden once put it, it was under the assumption that the indelible images of
January 6 would be able to maintain their resonance nearly four years later.
That assumption, broadly speaking, was wrong. Confronted with information that
could shake their worldviews, people can now search for confirming evidence and
mainline conspiracist feeds or decontextualized videos. They can ask AI and
their favorite influencers to tell them why they are right. They can build
tailored feeds and watch as algorithms deliver what they’re looking for. And
they will be overwhelmed with data.
The hum of the justification machine is comforting. It
makes the world seem less unpredictable, more knowable. Underneath the noise,
you can make out the words “You’ve been right all along.”
