Why does the right lie so much on social media?

Social media is full of all sides spreading misinformation, all sides arguing in bad faith, all sides jumping to conclusions etc. I will not attempt to argue that one side is better or worse in these regards, though, as a leftist, I naturally have my own beliefs on who is better and who is worse, but there’s a glut of these bad practices everywhere online so it would be hard to win the argument. I could list a litany of times the left have jumped to conclusions, or judged too quickly, or lacked nuance or…

But the right seems to me to engage in one particular bad practice more than the left. Just plain making things up. I don’t mean “distorting the truth”, I don’t mean “sensationalizing”, and I am definitely not talking about mere dubious inferences. I also do not have in mind, though I acknowledge it’s a fine line, the ironic hoaxes both sides engage in. The sort of hoaxes where the intention is the majority of the audience will get it, but a portion of the audience will post their confusion along the lines of ‘is this real??’ much to the amusement of those in the know.

I very particularly mean making things up from whole cloth with the full intention that as many people as possible will believe it, and that politics will be influenced by the lie. Also, I am only talking about random individuals online, I don’t want to get into debates about which media squad is better or worse.

I also acknowledge there are instances of this happening on the left, but it seems to me on the basis of years of being online, that the right outright fabricate things far more often than the left, and I’m really not sure why.

Here’s an especially clear example. A man in pride parade had his shirt photoshopped to read “trans kids are sexy”.

The guy who recently posted this on Twitter and had it go viral does seem to have had, to his credit, some degree of honesty in that he admitted that it was photoshopped, though far too late, after many people had shared it. He did not, however, delete the post, just appended a flippant, offhanded apology. He seemed to have no sense of the gravity of what he’d done in potentially ruining some guy’s life. He also had no sense of responsibility in his follow-up post, effectively saying: “Well the shirt is real and is being sold online so we need to stop that”. He seemed not to have learned his lesson- viz, anyone can put things up on the internet. Even algorithms automatically make T-Shirts online. It’s a good bet whoever made the Photoshop also put the shirt up on some online store. Still, the poster did give a lousy apology which I suppose he could have got away with withholding. That shows some (minimal) degree of respect for the truth.

The guy who made the photoshop though, whoever he is, and wherever he is, had no similar, minimal sense of honesty. He just made up an image up, either hatefully or recklessly uncaring about the harm he could have done- and still might do!- to a man’s life.

One possible argument to explain this difference between the left and right is that the right is nastier and has more dishonest people than the left. I don’t want to rule this argument out a priori on the grounds of “charity” or whatever. If this is true -and I’m not going to argue either for or against that- it may explain some of the differences. We can’t rule explanations like that out purely on the basis of a preference for a ‘balanced’ or ‘neutral’ view. However, I don’t think it’s the real explanation, because there are a lot of nasty people on both the left and the right, yet the gap is qualitative, not merely quantitative. Even if we think that right-wing people are twice as likely to be nasty and dishonest as left-wing people, that would only explain a 2:1 ratio, and I think the gap is bigger than that.

Another potential explanation works on the demand side of the equation. There are more gullible people on the right, because older people and people without degrees, both of whom are more vulnerable to online hoaxes, tend to be on the right.

We could test this by looking at countries where the left tends to be less educated (Brazil), older (Italy), or both.

So why don’t I dismiss this as a merely quantitative explanation for a qualitative phenomenon as I did with nastiness? Because there can be a threshold effect. Maybe if a large enough portion of your audience are gullible you can ‘get away’ with this, in a way you can’t if a smaller portion of your audience are gullible. If a leftist tried this, their tweet thread would be full of people on their own side going “well actually”, whereas the relatively few rightwing people doing this are drowned out because they fall below a threshold needed to sink a post with criticisms from its own side.

Another potential explanation that works on a threshold ratio, and fits in nicely as a complement to the previous hypothesis is that the right has greater discipline. The ones who see the hoax are more likely to keep their mouths shut than their equivalents on the left because they don’t want to make their own side look bad with that kind of public dissension.

Another possible explanation works as follows. Corey Robin is correct, the right are, at base, a formation based on irritable to furious incoherent reactions to things that threaten their view of the world, and their preferred arrangement of the world. Since they’re built on reacting to things they’re always looking for more stuff to react for, and the hardest stuff doesn’t come along naturally all the time, so sometimes you’ve got to make your own supply. I’m a bit skeptical of this explanation. I think it’s a little too pat, but who knows?

But my favorite explanation is this- caveat, I have no real evidence it’s true. The rightwing content creator is disgusted by what they seem as degeneracy, but they know if the argument is only about stuff that’s actually happening, trans kids most of whom aren’t taking hormones, non-sexual drag shows for kids, that sort of thing, eventually the public is going to become acclimatized and accept it. They know, eventually, they’re going to lose this one like they lost the argument over gay marriage and gay kids. Hence, to make people feel as they do, to make people sensitive to the wrongs they are, they feel they have to step up the content.

Thus, for them, they are not really lying because they are telling lies that show a deeper moral truth. In a literal sense, this guy might not be a pedophile, but in a deeper, spiritual sense he is, hence it’s not really lying. This is a way of seeing that is both lunacy and vile, but at least helps me understand.

The mother bear, mother of rainbows, protects