March 15, 2021 ☼ domestic-terrorism ☼ right-wing-extremism ☼ lies
Source: MPR News - Link
The story of Bruno Cua may end up as a testament to the dangers of misinformation. And he isn’t alone. The Justice Department has charged some 300 people so far with storming the Capitol that day, and most of them, to varying degrees, were motivated to do so by the falsehoods they had ingested for months online and on social media.
“One of the interesting things about the current misinformation landscape is that it’s not necessarily uninformed people,” said Sam Jackson, an assistant professor at University at Albany who studies extremist groups. “It’s misinformed people. It’s people who say, ‘I do my own research; I don’t trust the elites.’ And their research is nonsense, it is sophisticated nonsense.”
Critical thinking and civics are lacking in this group of people. It is easy to get taken in by lies if you don’t have some basis to trust expertise.