Muddying Murderous Waters

I watched Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis murder a man on Saturday. The killing was captured by multiple videos from several angles, and all tell the same undisputable story. As with their smearing of Renee Good a few weeks ago, I watched Trump administration officials immediately label Alex Pretti a domestic terrorist, claiming that he had approached the agents brandishing a gun intending a mass casuality attack. I watched an army of online and media right wing supporters launched into frame by frame "investigations" of the video footage seeking to prove that in fact the agents had acted in self-defense – that Good had tried to run over the agent with her car (she didn't), that Pettri had threatened agents with a gun (he didn't). The government declined to investigate the killings, instead aggressively attacking the character of the victims and guaranteeing impunity to the killers. But the video, as the Minneapolis chief of police pointed out, speaks for itself.

In my new piece for Foreign Policy (gift link), I draw on my old academic research on social media polarization and informational bubbles to explain how these narrative wars work, how ubiquitous videos do and don't deliver truth, and why in this case the lies seem to be failing.

I draw on a comparison to Gaza – not Tom Friedman's bizarre equation of ICE with Hamas, though, I go with the more obvious ICE equivalent. The administration's defamation of Pettri as a terrorist and efforts to deny the reality we could all see on video recalled long years of experience with similar deflection and denial narrative warfare by Israel during the long occupation of Palestine and the destruction of Gaza. The case that immediately came to mind was the May 2022 Israeli murder of the extremely well-known Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh while covering an Israeli raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. It was very obvious what happened: an Israeli sniper shot a clearly identified member of the press. But instead of proceeding from that reality, Israel and its supporters launched a full-scale campaign to suggest that perhaps she had been killed by friendly fire, or perhaps had been complicit in terrorist attacks, or really anything other than the clear reality. Twitter filled with mendacious frame by frame analysis of the footage purporting to show that Israeli forces could not have done the deed. Ultimately, rigorous analysis of all the evidence confirmed that she had, indeed, been killed by Israeli forces. But no justice followed.

These narrative wars over video footage reached their bloody epitome in Gaza after October 7, where both sides filmed developments constantly, posting endless videos documenting atrocities and bearing witness. Israeli information operations went to extraordinary lengths to contest, deny, and reframe every atrocity reported in the international media or documented online. Those campaigns – reinforced by social media algorithms, sympathetic mass media, and relentless repetition – shored up domestic support and rallied pro-Israeli circles abroad, but did not fool the many human rights organizations and international legal institutions which investigated, and ultimately failed to overcome the overwhelming video evidence which persuaded most mainstream observers of the reality of the atrocities.

My FP article argues that the response to the killings in Minneapolis by the Trump administration and its online supporters follows the Israeli script to the letter – as well as similar campaigns by the Syrian regime to defame the White Helmets, Russian campaigns to shape narratives in Ukraine, Saudi campaigns to deny responsibility for the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, and many other similar efforts by autocratic regimes.

I argue that presenting a credible counternarrative is not necessarily the point - and certainly finding "the truth" isn't. Those engaged in this form of narrative warfare seek to shift the debate away from truth/falsehood into a partisan disagreement with two sides, muddying the waters enough that the casual non-expert observer will throw up her hands in confusion. At the same time, they seek to offer their own supporters something – anything – which they can use. Supporting that counternarrative, no matter how implausible, then becomes a marker of in-group identity (it's all very Lisa Wedeen). Ostentatiously believing that Israel did not bomb a hospital or that ICE did not kill innocent civilians about in-group policing is how you signal membership in that community. That helps to explain why these kinds of issues often continue to rage hot within those communities long after most everyone else has moved on.

I argue that such tactics do not always work, though. In Gaza, the sheer weight of evidence eventually shifted mainstream perspectives decisively – even as that shift reinforced the adherence by the in-group to the fracturing narrative, such that projecting absolute confidence that Israel did not commit genocide is de rigeur for tribal membership to this day. We're seeing that In Minneapolis after Alex Pretti. Many of the voices which immediately embraced the counternarrative on Renee Good have been hesitant this time – right wing Twitter accounts posting video claiming to prove that Pretty was waving a gun were shouted down by their own followers who could see the video for themselves. Mainstream, usually non political social media such as Reddit and Instagram are swamped with outraged posts against ICE. Even right wing platforms like the Wall Street Journal and the Free Press are coming out against the lies. The Gaza precedent suggests that pro-Trump voices will likely continue to consolidate around their false narratives – but that they will grow ever more distant from a mainstream public which can see what happened and can't make head or tails of the tortured, weird stories which the regime dead-enders tell themselves.

There's a lot more nuance to the argument, thanks (sincerely) to my editor, even if I wrote it in a state of rage over the murder and the lies. Read the whole thing on Foreign Policy.