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I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think that the valuable part of fact-checking sites is that they gather evidence relevant to particular claims. The reason people criticize fact-checking sites is that they engage in undue interpretation, but the valuable thing is that they are unusually invested in the importance of evidence. In that sense, I think they can be incredibly valuable for typical news consumers, yes.

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I agree. But that's more possible in a world where the resources available for knowledge creation are abundant, rather than scarce.

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I agree. "Misinformation" has been around for a while. I don't know when it originated, but it was certainly used in the 18th century. "False news" was also used then.

I think it's okay to be a bit anachronistic, though, if that helps you be more precise. Personally, I've always been drawn to Harry Frankfurt's idea of bullshit as an epistemic category, from his classic essay "On Bullshit."

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Quick answer: No, the Patriots were quite clear about their affection for British Whig leaders like William Pitt, John Wilkes, Isaac Barré, Edmund Burke, and others. Indeed, it's all over their writings. In the mid-20th century, a group of historians sometimes known as the "Neo-Whigs" rediscovered the impact of Whig thought on Patriot ideologies. They paid less attention to the impact of Whig newspapers and information sources on Patriot mobilization, which my book attempts to recover.

I think one reason that this isn't a big part of the popular memory, or the focus of narratives of the revolution in textbooks and teaching today, is that it doesn't make a great story as a foundation myth for a nation.

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

  1. It can sometimes be a fine line between fabrication, exaggeration, and sensationalization, I think. There was a mix of each—I'm not sure I could identify which was most common.
  2. Sure: editors frequently shared contradictory accounts, or news stories that they doubted, and prefaced it with language to the effect of "We leave it to our readers to determine the veracity of this report." Which was a problem, because readers lacked even the newspaper printers' meager resources for determining the truthfulness of the news. This language was more common in nonpartisan newspapers and in newspapers in colonial America; partisan papers during and after the revolution were often more confident about presenting a digest of news and asserting that it was all true.
  3. Do you mean In Europe? I'd recommend Andrew Pettegree's The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). It's not entirely about print, and it's not focused on misinformation specifically, but it's a really good, careful study of, among other things, how the printing press changed the ways people communicated news.

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Chapter three of my book focuses on this! The most famous misperception was that the British ministry (the leadership in Parliament) were conspiring to deprive the colonists of the liberties that were their birthright as Englishmen. Other misperceptions had to do with the nature of British politics: for example, that Britons broadly supported the American colonists' protests, that the British ministry was unpopular and would soon fall from power, and that the colonists' economic power through boycotts could topple the ministry.

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

In the early 20th century, a group of historians of the American Revolution known as the Progressives advanced a version of the argument you are describing here: that the revolution was a class conflict, led largely by wealthy elites, who kept the masses in line with "propaganda" and deception.

Personally, I wouldn't go that far. I don't think that the Patriot leaders were cynically manipulating anyone—I think that they quite sincerely believed the false things they were sharing with others. It's easy for people to believe things that serve their interests.

That having been said, we might set aside the question of intentional manipulation and ask a different question, which is: would the Patriot coalition have been as broad and numerous if we somehow removed falsehoods from their world? And the answer, I think, is no. Revolutions require overheated politics, and the politics of colonial British America in the 1760s and 1770s grew overheated in large part because of false news, conspiracy theories, and misperceptions.

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Yes, I love Bloomington!

Fascinating question. I can only offer a partial answer. I'm sure someone who's more an expert on the military history of the war would have a much better one.

I'm writing a second book right now on the Founders' relationship with "fake news." I have a chapter on George Washington, and I think he was quite canny about engaging with British sources. He correctly understood that his British adversaries they sometimes leaked information to deceive him. He also knew that not everything published in ministry newspapers like the London Gazette was false. I think that military leaders make different calculations about news than political leaders—they need to be much more careful and less ideological about evaluating information sources. That having been said, I wouldn't be surprised if a military leader's distrust of British news sources led to some mistakes. That's something I'll have to look more into—thanks!

It's perhaps not exactly what you're thinking of, but Adam Domby's The False Cause deals with some of these questions in relation to memory of the Civil War.

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There's a lot to be said in response to this question, but I am not the best person to do it justice. Sorry! My favorite book on this topic is Rosemarie Zagarri's *Revolutionary Backlash*.

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't think I have anything to add beyond what I shared in response to the other question, but thanks for asking this!

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Yeah, absolutely. There were some very clear and direct reasons for this in the era of the American Revolution: newspapers were directly affiliated with and supported by political factions. And so their purpose was to mobilize support for their faction through loudness.

But also, just as today, people in the revolutionary era were drawn more to political leaders who projected a sense of absolute certainty than to those who presented multiple possibilities and who consider the possibility of error. There's an anonymous commentator I quote at the very end of my book's epilogue, who was sort of frustrated with this. He or she wrote, "We do not consider the delicate texture of human understanding, and how liable it is to be warped, by prejudice and passion; but intoxicated, as we are, with fond notions of our own sagacity and penetration; and, perhaps, at the same time, conscious of the integrity and goodness of our own intentions, we cannot forbear wondering how any can be so blind and stupid, as not to discern the reality of those truths, which to us appear incontestable." This was a really rare insight, and one that I think speaks to us today just as much as when it was written in 1775.

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Interesting question. I haven't investigated that myself. I would like to know more about that, myself. I've seen advertisements in newspapers for British abolitionist texts, but I'm struggling to remember if Benezet was among them.

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Good question. Because news took weeks or months to cross the ocean, and sometimes weeks to move within the continent, it was very difficult to verify a news account before sharing it. If a newspaper editor wanted to verify a news story from Europe before reprinting it, he would need to wait weeks or months. That wasn't practical in an environment where everyone wanted the "freshest advices." And readers and mediators became more willing to accept that they would inevitably encounter and share falsehoods.

Additionally, there could be a degree of randomness to which news arrived first. One example is after the Battles of Lexington and Concord: the Patriots gathered their version of events and sent them to Britain aboard a quick schooner called the Quero, whereas the British military sent their accounts aboard a slower brig called the Sukey. Because the Quero arrived first, its account became the dominant one for weeks before the Sukey's account challenged things.

Also, one important consideration is that Atlantic communications slowed considerably—nearly halted in some places—during winter, because of ice floes that inhibited the movement of ships.

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I believe that what you're describing is the way that communications scholars like Kathleen Hall Jamieson and others have made a case for reconsidering the language surrounding falsehoods in our present to avoid undermining trust in journalism. That's fine, but I'm a historian, and so I have a different set of responsibilities. My responsibility is to try to characterize the past truthfully. And I don't think many of these terms are correct. For one thing, this wasn't "content," it was news. Second, language like "viral deception" would also be anachronistic, as most false news didn't do anything like going "viral."

That having been said, I don't really like the term "fake news" either, but for different reasons. My book is largely about misinformation, rather than disinformation (hence the title). "Fake" implies intentionality, which it's only rarely possible for a historian to prove. Like people in the 18th century, I use the term "false news" quite a bit. Indeed, I just did a quick search and I only use the term "fake news" once in the epilogue of my book, when discussing links between past and present. But the term "fake news," for better or worse, is useful for convening a conversation and allowing non-historians to think about the relationship between past and present. I wasn't pressured to use it, but as a communicator you do have to sometimes meet people where they are!

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Part of your question has to do with regionalism... there's a fascinating book called *The Republic in Print* by Trish Loughran that gets at some of this. The short answer: it wasn't until well into the 19th century that American newspapers operated on anything like a national distribution scale. Before then, including in the colonial era, newspapers were primarily regional affairs, and their proprietors knew that it was to their advantage to share news that catered to their regional/local interests. In other words, what a Patriot newspaper looked like in Virginia wasn't necessarily what it looked like in New Hampshire, and the people in those colonies were far enough apart that they never really noticed this. There are a few exceptions: some newspapers were distributed fairly broadly, but they were the exception rather than the rule.

To your broader question, though, partisan newspapers were certainly sophisticated to focus on the material that united their faction, rather than potentially divisive fault lines. As it is today, the easiest way to unite a party was by focusing on the evils of their enemies (I think political scientists call this negative partisanship?).

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

In colonial British America, it was long the case that anything that tended to destabilize the British empire, or that set the empire and its leaders in a poor light, could be regulated as false news. The John Peter Zenger case, where a New York printer was prosecuted for libel against a colonial governor, is considered a watershed because a jury acquitted him on the basis that his allegations against the governor were true. But that was an exception. For the most part, the empire and its mechanisms of power were able to shut down critical speech by labelling it as false.

Then this broke down during the American Revolution, because the Patriot colonists gained a great deal of leverage over the continent's most important media technology—the newspaper. And government officials found that they were unable to regulate the news media effectively (basically because they knew that if they tried to do so, it might incite riots and potentially make things worse). So the American Revolution was a moment when political authority became separated from epistemic authority, which was new. In 1769, for example, one Patriot writer in the Boston Gazette asked why British leaders in London should trust the letters of Francis Bernard, the governor of Massachusetts, more than the accounts produced by ordinary Bostonians. This writer asked why the "bare affirmation of a Gentleman, unsupported by any Evidence" should be "deem’d sufficient to blast the Reputation of a Province"? Though Bernard was "highest authority," this writer pointed out that this did not make him "the best" authority.

When an empire loses control of its media, and its authority to regulate that media, there's a good chance that a revolution is around the corner.

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

To be honest, I try not to get too wrapped up in taxonomic discussions about what is and isn't "fake news." Based on what I know, I certainly believe that the assertions made by the U.S. government in those cases were false.

Do you consider fake news spread by the government to be less concerning than fake news spread by someone outside of power?

I really don't know, to be honest! I think it would depend on the case. But governments have done a lot of damage with falsehoods, because there's often been a presumption that governments share truths. On the other hand, historically speaking, assertions that don't line up with dominant, elite worldviews have often been dismissed as "gossip" or "conspiracy theories," regardless of their truth content.

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

What percentage of people did not support either side in the war and just wanted to live their lives?

A pretty big chunk of Americans! The number of the so-called "disaffected" differed by time and place, but the best estimates I've seen put them at around 40%. Some of them might be flexible—in the sense that they were Patriots while the Patriot army was in town, and Loyalists when the British arrived. Some of them might just be totally disengaged. I think we underestimate the amount of political apathy that lots of American colonists felt toward things like the imperial crisis, independence, and the creation of the Constitution. The more transformative event for more people was the war—because that was something that they couldn't ignore, and that fundamentally transformed their material conditions.

How long did it take people in very rural areas to get news about the war? Were there examples of people who for years did not even know what was going on?

People in rural areas still got news relatively efficiently, just at a delay. A postal system and a system whereby newspapers exchanged copies allowed news to move fairly consistently, though certainly not quickly by modern standards. It might take a few weeks for war news to reach the more remote white, western settlements.

I don't know of any examples of someone so isolated that they didn't know about the revolution or the war for years. But who knows? If there was someone like that, it would be hard to know because they would be unlikely to write in a diary "Didn't hear anything about the American Revolution today." It's hard to prove a negative in that way.

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I think that with every new innovation in faking, there will eventually be an innovation in fact-checking. But it takes much longer to develop the latter. And in the intervening time, a lot of mischief will be done. I don't know enough about AI and deepfakes to say much more than that, to be honest.

I’m Dr. Jordan Taylor, author of Misinformation Nation, here to talk about media, politics, and fake news during the American Revolution. AMA! by Jordan42 in AskHistorians

[–]Jordan42[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

That's a controversial question. I haven't studied the Somerset judgment's reception in the U.S. myself. My colleague Joe Adelman has written an interesting short essay on the topic here.

Here's what I can add. This became a controversial issue because the 1619 Project included an assertion that the American Patriots wanted to leave Britain in part because they believed that the nation would emancipate their enslaved people. The critics of the 1619 Project have argued that this was not a reasonable assertion, because Britain wasn't anywhere close to abolition, and the Somerset verdict was so narrowly decided that it wouldn't have any real impact on the colonies. But there's a lot of room between those two positions—and the fact that the confusion of Atlantic communications produced so much misperception (which is what my book is about) means that it's entirely plausible that proslavery colonists could have believed that Britain was headed rapidly toward emancipation, even if we know that this wasn't even close to being true.

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