A lie told often enough may not be sufficient to make people believe it is true, but can be if you get enough people to say it, effecting a normalization of the lie until it is “true” for most people. It is an inorganic, and powerful, way of manipulating people that is also known as “reflexive network dynamics” as James Lindsay explains:
One of the ways reflexive propaganda campaigns spread on social media is through what we should call “reflexive network dynamics.” This is a very important concept for understanding not just propaganda today but also the gaming and weaponizing of the algorithms.
Reflexivity
First, a quick review. Reflexivity refers to a propaganda technique in which the same message appears everywhere all at once, reflected from all angles, until it takes off virally.
Ultimately, “reflexivity” in this regard springs from the tools George Soros laid out for doing “social alchemy” in his 1992 book The Alchemy of Finance. In that book, Soros explains that while the natural sciences are actually scientific, the social sciences are actually alchemical. One might say that the point of studying society is not to understand it, but to change it, even.
Soros indicates that the difference between social sciences (or, as he calls it “social alchemy”) and natural sciences is that the participants in social sciences are themselves influenced by participation in the situation. He recognizes that this “reflexive” state of affairs can be arranged inorganically to create social change and refers to reflexivity as a “dialectic” and a theory of “historical change.”
Soros’s point is that reflexivity occurs when changes in perception start to cascade into greater changes in perception, and this only happens when people’s beliefs are out of alignment with reality, with the more the better. He understands that reflexivity can also be manufactured by getting people to start to believe false things, and that belief is largely a social process.
