Misinformation (In Practice)

The Washington Post has an article about Republican false-flag ads.

The story talks about the SuperPACs that were buying ads that looked like pro-Harris ads on the surface but, underneath, were intended to depress voters.

The part of the story that *I* found most interesting was this one:

Democrats grew alarmed in the final weeks of the campaign as the ads started appearing on Facebook and Google. Priorities USA, a Harris-backing super PAC, made efforts to get spots taken down from both platforms because of their deceptive nature. Google eventually struck at least one spot in which one of the Building America’s Future groups took footage from a Harris ad in Pennsylvania targeting Jews and began targeting it to Muslims with the words “This is a real Kamala Harris ad” superimposed.

Other efforts to get ads taken down were not successful. Facebook, which has pared back its ad restrictions since 2020, declined to act on a number of requests to take down ads from Progress 2028 that praised the Harris agenda while also describing policies she did not support in 2024, like mandatory gun buybacks, universal health care for undocumented immigrants and “the most progressive Green New Deal yet.”

The part of the article that I found interesting was the specific phrasing of “describing policies she did not support in 2024”.

I looked up Harris on mandatory gun buybacks and, yep, she supported a mandatory gun buyback in 2020.

I looked up universal health care for undocumented immigrants and found that she supported it back in 2019.

And, of course, she supported the Green New Deal back in 2020.

The dirty trick, in this case, is portraying all of these things as positives and reasons to vote for Harris.

You know the liberal-types who say stuff like “don’t threaten me with a good time!” when someone might point out that Harris supports Student Loan Forgiveness?

To what extent is it a dirty trick to say that Harris holds the position that student loans should be forgiven?

(That last one one was from the National Education Association, not a Republican group.)

There is something absurd about calling a politician’s actual words “misinformation”.

We all agree that it’s appropriate to attack a politician for a position that they held five years ago. We all agree that it’s appropriate to praise a politician for a position they held five years ago.

The dirty trick here, the “misinformation”, seems to be that the ads are giving the viewer an insight into what Kamala “really” thinks her “real” constituency wants and would be a real reason to vote for her. And, of course, giving evidence that she holds the position that the ad is praising her for holding.

The only real way to fight against this particular piece of “misinformation” would be something like a long-form interview where her current positions are clarified and her old ones are officially abandoned (perhaps even with some explanations for why). “Yes. I did think that. I now don’t. I now know that it’s a bad policy but I didn’t know that back then.”

And such a format would be to the benefit of the politicians *AND* to the people trying to figure out who to vote for.

Which could then be quoted four or five years later.

Hey. Don’t threaten me with a good time!