According to some people, voting is one of our civic duties. Fundamentally, voting amounts to some portion of the population imposing their wills on the remaining portion of the population. Stated in such terms, even though voting is morally permissible, it is difficult to see how you could have a bonafide duty to do something like that.
On the other hand, if you do decide to vote, precisely because you are attempting to do something that will affect other people’s lives (very often against their wishes), you may have a duty to put yourself in a position to be able to make a good decision about it.
When you vote, you are essentially contributing to the coercion of others so you should have good reason to think that what you are doing is well-informed and that it is just.
If you’re a Democrat and you vote for Kamala Harris and she later becomes the next president, you have slightly contributed to forcing those who voted for Donald Trump to live in a state of affairs that they had wished to avoid. Similarly, if you were to vote for Measure A in LA County and it passed, you would be forcing those who opposed it to forfeit a portion of their earnings to support programs that they did not see as worthwhile.
Despite voting being a deceptively unobjectionable activity, since you are attempting to make decisions about the lives of others, the least that can be expected is that you do the bare minimum to give yourself the ability to make sound decisions about what to vote for. We can do this primarily by gaining true beliefs and shielding ourselves from misinformation.
But we also know that there are many foreign and domestic threats to our epistemic states – ones that can very easily corrode our prospects for choosing correctly.
Matthew Olsen, the head of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice recently warned that, “In Russia […] malicious actors are leveraging artificial intelligence to manufacture content, such as fake videos of the vice president meant to spread disinformation. Moreover, he said, Moscow has upped its game in another way – laundering Kremlin talking points through U.S.-based social media influencers who have large online followings.”
In one such instance, Russian operatives solicited prominent conservative social media influencers to create a video blaming Ukraine and the US for a terrorist attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow, presumably in order to decrease opposition in the US to Russia’s campaign in Ukraine. ISIS had already taken responsibility for the attack.
It’s surprisingly easy to influence the beliefs of millions of people. Several private media companies and government agencies have released reports detailing the tactics used by Russia, China, Iran and other countries.
China has spent countless millions to spread falsehoods and half-truths across social media, which have inevitably ended up on our feeds. Posts by Chinese or Russian nationals pretending to be American are regularly picked up and reposted by actual Americans whose opinions are validated by such content, very quickly propagating misinformation.
We know this to be the case and yet many of us continue to form opinions based on what some random account shares or what some family member or acquaintance has posted despite having no reason to think that the information has been verified or fact-checked. It should go without saying that in order to form justified beliefs, the influence of this type of evidence source on our beliefs should be highly limited.
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Hostile nations are not limiting themselves to simply spreading false information. They are also targeting our political and social inclinations by exposing us to bizarre reasoning. Research by the Brennan Center identified numerous posts by accounts linked to the Kremlin-controlled Internet Research Agency that did just that. Russians pretending to be American with handles like “iowa.patriot” posting images with captions like “If white privilege existed, why did Elizabeth Warren have to spend decades lying about her ethnicity to get ahead?”
Posts like these are rampant on social media on both sides of the political divide, and the aim is to ever so slightly push those who are already sympathetic with the message closer to complete entrenchment in those beliefs and to make them slightly less receptive to counterevidence. Whatever we think about the extent and existence of “white privilege”, posts like these should have no bearing on our beliefs at all and yet, they do.
By not taking this into account and not limiting your exposure to sources of misinformation and twisted reasoning, you are setting up your epistemic states for decay. You are thereby failing to meet the minimum expectation for those who wish to foist their vision on others.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. He is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.