When repetition masquerades as truth
There’s something rather unsettling about discovering that the crowd you’ve been listening to may not actually exist. Recent claims about the disappearance of enormous numbers of Russian bots have generated considerable excitement online. Whether those claims are entirely accurate remains uncertain, but they’ve raised a fascinating question: how many of the voices we encounter on social media actually represent independent human opinions?
We’ve become accustomed to measuring public opinion by volume. Thousands of posts, hundreds of comments, endless shares. Surely that many people can’t be wrong? Except a thousand posts don’t necessarily represent a thousand people. Sometimes they’re the same message repeated through multiple accounts. And sometimes they’re perfectly ordinary people repeating something they haven’t bothered to investigate.
Of course, there’s nothing particularly new about this. Human beings have been confusing repetition with truth for centuries. Rumours become accepted wisdom, prejudices become common sense, and religious teachings become unquestionable traditions simply because we’ve heard them so often. Familiarity has an extraordinary ability to masquerade as authority.
The biblical tradition offers some interesting warnings about this. The prophets frequently stood against prevailing opinion, and Jesus certainly didn’t treat popularity as evidence of righteousness. Crowds could celebrate him one day and demand his execution another. The number of people shouting something tells us remarkably little about whether they understand what they’re shouting about.
And here’s where things get uncomfortable. We readily recognize manipulation when it involves opinions we dislike. Those people are gullible. Those people are trapped in echo chambers. But how often do we question a claim that confirms something we already believe? How many times have we shared an article because we liked its conclusion rather than because we’d examined its evidence?
Christian discernment ought to demand something more substantial than agreement with our existing convictions. It requires curiosity, intellectual humility, and a willingness to entertain the possibility that we’re mistaken. A claim doesn’t become more truthful simply because it has acquired an enthusiastic audience.
Perhaps the disappearance of some automated chatter will make the internet a little quieter. But even if every bot vanished tomorrow, we’d still have to contend with our very human tendency to mistake repetition for confirmation. So the next time a thousand voices appear to agree, perhaps we should ask whether we’re hearing a thousand independent witnesses – or one mouth speaking a thousand times. And would we recognize the difference if it were saying exactly what we wanted to hear?
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