{"id":162418,"date":"2025-07-27T07:25:12","date_gmt":"2025-07-27T15:25:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=162418"},"modified":"2025-07-27T07:25:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-27T15:25:12","slug":"seeing-through-the-noise-why-ordinary-people-are-less-gullible-than-elites-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=162418","title":{"rendered":"Seeing Through the Noise: Why Ordinary People Are Less Gullible Than Elites Think"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, a dominant narrative emerged among elite media and political institutions: that Russian interference\u2014particularly via Facebook ads\u2014had a decisive impact on the outcome. This idea became the justification for an ever-expanding push toward content moderation<\/em>, \u201cdisinformation\u201d crackdowns<\/em>, and the surveillance of online discourse. But what if this premise is fundamentally flawed?<\/p>\n

Enter Hugo Mercier\u2019s Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe<\/em><\/a>. In it, Mercier flips the script: humans, he argues, did not evolve to be easily manipulated. In fact, when it comes to core interests\u2014politics, values, identity\u2014we\u2019re astonishingly resistant to persuasion. The idea that a few thousand rubles\u2019 worth of Facebook ads could change the course of a presidential election isn\u2019t just unproven\u2014it\u2019s anthropologically naive.<\/p>\n

The Elite\u2019s Gullibility Panic<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Elite commentary often rests on an implicit assumption: the public is too stupid or fragile to sort signal from noise<\/em>. Hence the calls for more fact-checking, algorithmic downranking, and government-private partnerships to \u201cprotect democracy.\u201d From New York Times op-eds<\/a> to White House initiatives<\/a>, there\u2019s a steady drumbeat: Americans were duped by memes, bots, and troll farms, and must be protected\u2014by experts.<\/p>\n

But this worldview collapses under Mercier\u2019s insight. Evolution would not have designed humans to fall for claims that risk their survival. People may be misinformed, but that\u2019s not the same as gullible. It\u2019s a rational skepticism calibrated for a noisy world. What looks like resistance to \u201ctruth\u201d is often just resistance to manipulation\u2014especially when it comes from institutions people don\u2019t trust.<\/p>\n

The Absurdity of the Facebook Ad Panic<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Consider the core claim: that Russian Facebook ads swayed voters. As WaPo reported<\/a>, most ads ran after<\/em> the election. The total spend was less than what a local car dealership might drop in a weekend campaign. And the targeting? Crude, broad, and mostly ineffective. Yet elite institutions inflated this into a democracy-threatening conspiracy. Why?<\/p>\n

Because it let them avoid reckoning with the real reason Trump won: millions of Americans rejected elite consensus<\/strong>. The Russia panic became a form of elite self-soothing. If voters were tricked, it wasn\u2019t our policies, blind spots, or condescension that failed\u2014it was outside manipulation.<\/p>\n

Mercier vs. the Censorship Industrial Complex<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Mercier shows that persuasion works best when it aligns with pre-existing motivations and trusted messengers. Random political ads from a foreign troll farm don\u2019t meet that standard. Neither do \u201ccorrective\u201d fact-checks from institutions already seen as biased. In fact, overzealous censorship can increase<\/em> mistrust, making people double down on their views. As Mercier writes, people are more like \u201cargumentative filterers\u201d than passive absorbers. We reason socially, not mechanically.<\/p>\n

So when elites advocate for social media censorship \u201cfor the public good,\u201d they\u2019re working from a model of human cognition that doesn\u2019t exist. They imagine citizens as blank slates to be safeguarded by better-informed elites. But Mercier reminds us: humans are stubborn, skeptical, and often wiser than their rulers give them credit for.<\/p>\n

Real Clarity Requires Real Respect<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Accepting Mercier\u2019s insight changes how you view the media panic around disinformation. It doesn\u2019t mean bad actors don\u2019t exist or that lies never spread\u2014it means we shouldn’t build surveillance states or speech police based on imagined mass gullibility. Ordinary people, especially when engaged and informed, are better BS detectors than they’re given credit for.<\/p>\n

The true threat isn\u2019t citizen gullibility\u2014it\u2019s elite fragility. Their fear that the public might think for itself leads to demands for control. But if we believe in democracy, we must believe people can reason, argue, and choose for themselves. As Mercier makes clear, we weren\u2019t born yesterday. And we\u2019re not buying what the elite media is selling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, a dominant narrative emerged among elite media and political institutions: that Russian interference\u2014particularly via Facebook ads\u2014had a decisive impact on the outcome. This idea became the justification for an ever-expanding push toward content … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-162418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=162418"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162418\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":162419,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162418\/revisions\/162419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=162418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=162418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=162418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}