A battle among competing narratives has developed in Minnesota. If you follow the news, you have undoubtedly seen at least some of the stories about recent shootings.

Lies and Rumors Outrun Truth

The first news reports about crisis events are often filled with inaccurate information (Spiro and Starbird, 2024; Zeng, Starbird, and Spiro, 2016). People want to understand what happened. They want to make sense of events. We all search for information. While we are searching for accurate information, people often push rumors and narratives for their own reasons. Some of those people push false rumors and narratives – that is, disinformation.

The old idiom: A lie can run around the world before the truth has laced up its shoes. The truth is slow to start; it takes time for accurate information to become clear and be released. Rumors and false narratives don’t have to wait. With the shootings in Minnesota, you can find reliable descriptions of exactly what happened. Many people have shared their cellphone videos, and there is a lot of detailed information. I advise discretion in looking at all information.

Presenting Competing Narratives May Be a Form of Disinformation

As with most news in the US, there are competing narratives about the shootings by ICE officers. Conservative news media and social media posters have focused on the protestors. They have argued that the protestors were violent. They’ve suggested the two individuals who were shot threatened ICE officers, either with a car or with a gun. They have called the victims terrorists. They have also blamed the protestors overall and the democratic leaders of Minnesota and Minneapolis.

On the other hand, people have pointed out that neither Renee Good nor Alex Pretti was violent. They were involved in peaceful protests and were observing ICE actions. The officers shot when they weren’t threatened. Progressives have noted that the victims were peaceful protestors who did not deserve to be killed.

Is your information feed more sympathetic to one narrative or the other? Both sets of news and information feeds exist (see this quick analysis of posts by University of Washington professorKate Starbird and her team).

But presenting both narratives equally can be a form of disinformation if one version more accurately depicts what happened (Imundo and Rapp, 2022).

The Uneven Battle for the Overall Narrative

Many of the news stories and social media posts have focused on each event. But in some cases, people work to connect these events to broader narratives or frames—ways of seeing these killings as part of a bigger story about what is happening in the US. And it is here that our fractured news and social media systems most obviously differ by political orientation.

People who present disinformation and conspiracy theory narratives see connections among distinct events. They present overall narratives. The advantage of having an overall narrative is that it makes it easier for people to make sense of and later remember the events. With the same underlying narrative used for each event, people will understand that narrative, remember the individual events, and more easily connect similar new events to the narrative.

In contrast, most mainstream journalists work to present factual information about each news event they cover. They don’t call all protestors violent or call them terrorists. They don’t present all ICE officers as out of control. If you follow mainstream news journalists, they note that there have been two killings by ICE officers in Minnesota. They rarely make any deeper connection between the two events. Journalists generally treat these as isolated events without making a connection to a deeper narrative or frame.

Without an overall narrative, each event is treated separately. When a new event occurs, it does not automatically bring to mind previous events since they are not connected to the same underlying story. People have to work to explain each event, rather than see all the events as having the same underlying narrative.

A Lesson for Winning a Disinformation War

My overall point is that there is a lesson here for how to win a disinformation war. People who spread disinformation are not worried about sharing correct facts. They repetitively use simple narratives. They want people to believe the underlying narrative for political or financial reasons.

If you want people to believe and understand a different narrative based on factual information, you need to present simple and clear underlying narratives. You can present the facts about each event, but you also need to connect each new event to a clear underlying narrative. That will help people make sense of and remember the full set of events.

Winning a disinformation war doesn’t depend on presenting facts and true stories. Winning an information war depends on connecting better narratives that help people make sense of and remember the events and narratives.

References

Imundo, M. N., & Rapp, D. N. (2022). When fairness is flawed: Effects of false balance reporting and weight-of-evidence statements on beliefs and perceptions of climate change. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 11(2), 258-271.

Spiro, E. S., & Starbird, K. (2023). Rumors have rules. Issues in Science and Technology, 39(3), 47-49.

Zeng, L., Starbird, K., & Spiro, E. S. (2016, January). Rumors at the speed of light? Modeling the rate of rumor transmission during crisis. In 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) (pp. 1969-1978). IEEE.

See The New York Times here and here.