In age of social media, fake news is becoming a real problem

Monday, Nov. 28, 2016 | 2 a.m.

Two weeks before the election, listeners of the National Public Radio program “This American Life” got a chilling look at the perverse power of alt-right misinformation campaigns.

The program that week focused on immigration tensions in St. Cloud, Minn., where 90 percent of the 190,000 residents are white and about 5 percent are Somalis who emigrated to the community over the past 15 years.

In a key moment from the program, the producers played a recording of a town-hall meeting in 2015 in which some participants complained that the Somali residents weren’t assimilating into American culture and pressed the community’s Republican congressman, Tom Emmer, to push for a nationwide ban on Muslim immigrants.

Emmer was taken aback. He tried to explain that by standard metrics — finding employment, sending kids to public schools, paying taxes — Somalis were among the fastest-assimilating groups in the population. He reminded the crowd that other immigrant populations had faced anti-immigrant pushback, including predominantly white Germans and Poles.

“I’m going to say it out loud: When you move to a community, as long as you are here legally, I am very sorry but you don’t get to slam the gate behind you and tell nobody else that they’re unwelcome,” Emmer told the town hall. “That’s not the way this country works.”

The message didn’t take. Audience members told Emmer that he wasn’t listening; that they didn’t “feel in control of what is happening in our city,” even though there was nothing to suggest that the white population had lost its political power, and no evidence that the Somalis had gained control by criminal means.

So what was happening?

Over the past several years, there had been a number of presentations in the St. Cloud area about the dangers of Islamic immigrants by people like Ron Branstner, a former volunteer Minuteman along the U.S.-Mexico border who helped spot people crossing illegally.

Among Branstner’s talking points was a warning that Muslim immigrants were taking part in an organized campaign to take over U.S. communities and establish Sharia law.

“I know the Quran. I know Islam,” he said during a presentation recorded by the program. “Sharia law does not believe in man-made laws. It’s against the religion. All laws come from their god. If you go outside of their laws in Sharia, you will be considered apostate and you will die.”

Branstner isn’t the only person who believes this. There’s even a widespread alt-right fable that Sharia law has actually been established in an American city — Dearborn, Mich.

According to “This American Life,” fear of Muslims has grown to hysteria in places like St. Cloud, to the extent that mothers are worried that their granddaughters will become second-class citizens and be forced into polygamous marriages.

This is heartbreaking and alarming. How does it happen to otherwise rational people?

At the heart of the problem is fake news, misinformation and a social media environment that allows people to live in their own information bubble, where lies become accepted as truth through repetition and “confirmation” by sources the individuals considers trustworthy.

In psychology, the inability to differentiate between what’s real and what’s unreal defines insanity. By that definition, the American people at large could be considered insane because so many can’t differentiate between the depiction of the real world versus the one being described through fake news and misinformation.

This isn’t a question of bias, which involves expressing an opinion about the interpretation of facts. It’s about people being misled into believing in events that simply never happened, then becoming afraid of things that don’t exist. That’s clinical paranoia.

The nation desperately needs to step back from this brink.

It won’t be easy, but it raises the stakes on internet leaders to come up with ways to flag misinformation and fake news more quickly and more urgently.

As shown vividly in St. Cloud, the sanity of society itself is at stake.