So the first rule of marketing club is know your freaking audience. I mean seriously, you should know everything about them: how they think, what’s important to them, what they identify with, how they process and store information, how they make decisions, what they like, what they don’t like.
In watching the Dems and ReThugs circle each other nationally every 2 years, I feel the GOP knows us inside out, but lefties act like they don’t know a God damn thing about conservatives, especially around the ideas of motivation and information processing.
Because I do a lot of market research in red communities, and grew up in a very red rural place, I’m going to do some redsplaining as it relates to voter motivation and messaging.
I’m going to start this series with some observations about misinformation. The role of fake news in this election was outsized, and frankly, downright scary. It seemed the right wing noise machine had finally figured out how to make full use of the Internet, which really highlighted the different ways the left and the right respond to propaganda.
Over the years, when my conservative friends on Facebook went on a rant about guns or gays or minorities, said rant would often start with a bald faced lie based about some sort of meme. The kind of thing that was patently, and obviously false. And if one wasn’t sure, one could have spent about a few seconds confirming said meme was false by using a really simple search.
Usually, I would find myself patiently explaining that it was false, provide them a link to the proof, and then explain why their behavior was offensive. The conservative reply would inevitably be: “Oh, well, thanks for telling me, but I don’t really care, it’s what I believe anyway.”
Let’s fast forward to this election. I have had countless Facebook friends who range from almost anarchists to solid Dems, and they are all feverishly sharing posts about Democratic click bait memes that are false, encouraging connections to ignore said memes, and telling people definitely not to repost them. They didn’t care that these memes might support the liberal narrative.
So the conservatives are happy to repost anything that fits their narrative, regardless of veracity. Probably smart in a propaganda war. The liberals are careful about re-posting suspicious items, taking the time to check them, and generally avoiding the spread of junk news. Probably not smart in a propaganda war.
This seems to have been borne out by market forces. The buzzfeed article about the kids in Macendonia making false news items to draw ad revenue was particularly revealing: by far the highest volume of re-posts, and therefore the most profitable misinformation, were items fed to the Republicans.
I’m not going to draw some grand conclusion from this right now, I’m still processing. But I do think it speaks to a fundamental difference in the ways that the right and the left process information, and that we really need to think more strategically about how we message to conservatives if facts don’t really matter. In other words, stop treating them like they are us.
In the meantime, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to harnessing all of this passion to do something about the dreaded #Drumpf, and start making some noise in our own unique Dem style (in other words, not through retweeting fake news.) And also, how do we get folks engaged who aren’t experienced activists and political junkies? (Hint: It’s not yelling at them about safety pins and Facebook posts.) So I’m collaborating on a site called Dissent Engine that is going to feature a #DailyDissent activity that is easy to complete every day — accessible, reasonably fast, meaningful, and even occasionally fun. A collective reminder of what we stand for.
It will also will feature a mix of more serious projects and blog posts about messaging and dissent. Dissent Engine is on Twitter too @DissentEngine!