“Have you heard it? Have you heard it? Hoo-whoo! There is a hen who has plucked out all her feathers just to please the rooster. She must be freezing to death; that is, if she isn’t dead already. Hoo-whoo! Hoo-whoo!”
As H C Andersen’s fairy tale about the single feather that became five hens after having been told and retold in henhouses around town metaphorically describes the extremely powerful mechanism in spreading stories that wander verbally. Orally told and retold wandering stories can reach a wide audience in a short time, because they spread with exponential speed. They can also be spread over long distances. If one person tells a story to five people, and this is repeated 8 times, the story will potentially be able to reach an audience of 390,000.
Wandering stories are spread through person to person gossip or social media platforms, where there is no fact check. If it is true or not has nothing to say for if a wandering story is spread online. A study from MIT states that false stories are 70 % more likely to be retweeted than true stories. According to the story It takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people. The researchers tracked roughly 126,000 cascades of stories spreading on Twitter, which were cumulatively tweeted over 4.5 million times by about 3 million people, from the years 2006 to 2017.
The storyteller is the loudest voice in the room
It is a great advantage for right wing populists if they manage to seed themes that are discussed in daily talk among people. The discussion in informal groups of people can create epistemic bubbles or echo chambers. When there is absence of critical voices wandering stories can be broadcast and amplified in echo chambers.
In the absence of a critical voice in a group of people, the flow of information risks merging into conformity. Some researchers have put forward that the conformity in closed echo chambers is important for making wandering stories, gossip and rumours with strong negative biases accepted. An Echo chamber is, as defined by philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, a social epistemic structure from which other relevant voices have been actively excluded and discredited. An epistemic bubble occurs when the critical voices, perhaps accidentally, have been left out. This exclusion is important for an echo chamber to function over time.
The interesting thing about digging up ghosts of old Nazis has been to study the methods they used to win popular support. This could possibly tell us about how the modern right-wing extremists propagate their ideology and, hopefully, prevent history from repeating itself.
The disaster when Hitler was handed power in a “coalition government” after the party reached over 30% of the votes in 1932, was fairly unique. The fact that East Germany experienced a flourishing of neo-Nazi organisations and racially-motivated violence in the chaos that evolved around the unification of Germany in 1990 makes the development in Germany at this time interesting as an object of investigation.
The extreme right-wing upsurge was primarily in East Germany, and, to a lesser extent, West Germany. At this time, immediately following unification, there was high unemployment and little political organisation in East Germany. There were also relatively few immigrants and refugees in East Germany. People therefore had less contact with immigrants and refugees and relied on handed down information and, sometimes, wild rumour.
This illustrates the point that lack of social contact between groups of different cultures can make a fertile ground for xenophobia and foreign hate. Because it is easier to form stereotypes about somebody that you do not know, and easier to spread them about groups of people that are unknown to everybody in the in-group.
A stereotype is a generalisation that social behaviour is connected to a particular group of people:
Common Stereotypes
- Gender: “Men don’t cry. Women are too emotional.”
- Race/Ethnicity: “Black people are athletic. Hispanics are all immigrants.”
- Nationality: “Americans are loud. Germans are always punctual.”
- Profession: “Artists are disorganized. Lawyers are greedy.”
We all participate in informal social groups, like our family, friends, lunch gang, sewing circle, in the pub and in the cafe, football supporters group or religious groups. These groups can function as micro political arenas, where political ideas are shaped, and may be conformed and strengthened when there is no critical voice. The information flow in such informal groups has else no fact check or reality control.
Research on attitudes among young people from East Germany that indicates that the ones having negative stereotypes of immigrants and refugees had verbal communication in informal groups like friends and family as their primary source of information. This was before the Internet was in common use. In addition to the physically existing social echo chambers, there are social media echo chambers that exist mainly on social media platforms on the Internet, see section 3 , section 9, and section 13
In an investigation from the former German Democratic Republic in 1990, it was stated that:
“Informal groups presumably have a higher degree of subjectivity. The tendency to reproduce opinions and moods by oneself, far from any objectivity and reality, entails a great danger of increasing false images and enemy images of the foreigners who live here. This is emphasised by the connection between increasing dissatisfaction with oneself and intolerance on the one hand, and more frequent information in friendship and acquaintance circles about foreigners on the other” (Friedrich/Schubarth 1991).
Mary Diane Cantrell, who has researched on urban legends, suggests in her master thesis that shared urban legends or wandering stories have a function, tying the group together: “Legends provide a way for people to bond with one another. Even if a group is made up of people who do not know one another, sharing a story about how a local retailer refuses to support troops or how a local chain restaurant uses subpar ingredients in its dishes can make the group feel like a cohesive bunch. By sharing the outrage that Starbucks will not send coffee to troops in the Middle East, for example, is an easy way for the group to have something in common and to bond over.”
It sometimes demands requires courage to break the conformity by correcting the facts or asking for sources or if the story is representative, when a biased, negative story about somebody from an out-group is shared in a group of people. Speaking up in defence of a person or group of people can feel daunting, as you may fear offending others or disrupting the atmosphere.
Cantrell describes the way social groups conform around a wandering story so that it develops into a echo chamber without external input: “Additionally, human nature may drive a member of the group who either does not believe the story or does not believe they are hearing the whole story not to voice disbelief as it could jeopardise their acceptance in the group. At the same time, the person who shared the story has not only created an opportunity for the group to converge but has also possibly met some emotional needs by making himself feel important for breaking the ice and sharing the tantalising information that others have responded to with strong emotion.”
What if an individual story of a crime is true?
Some stories are like Trojan horses; they carry a small truth to sneak in a larger deception. Selective storytelling of immigration crime are subversive tactics that can be used to seise power.
What happens when a story of crime committed by an out-group is not entirely fabricated, but true, or at least partially true? These narratives pack an even greater political punch than outright lies. Crimes are committed by people of every social strata, colour, nationality, and religion, but selective storytelling transforms isolated incidents into a tool for inducing fear and antipathy.
Partially true stories are resilient. Unlike falsehoods, they are harder to refute. How do you counter a narrative when a victim publicly confirms its details? This emotional authenticity makes them powerful weapons in the arsenal of propaganda.
Selective storytelling
Right-wing organisations have perfected cherry picking immigrant crime stories. In Scandinavia, these groups have been known to comb through media reports, and encourage activists to collect and share such incidents about refugees and immigrants. These stories have then been spread online. Researchers Anton Törnberg and Mattias Wahlström studied the Facebook group “Stand Up for Sweden,” which boasted over 167,000 members. They found that group members selectively gathered and circulated stories about immigrant crime.
“External media sources were used by group members to demonstrate and criticise:
(1) that Sweden and Swedish values are under threat;
(2) that Swedes, especially Swedish men, face ‘reverse discrimination’; and
(3) the prevalence of a politically correct elite producing ‘fake news.'”
Although these stories might be factually true individually, their total presentation is disinformation because the selection of data is not statistically representative. The careful curation of such stories leads to a misleading portrayal, painting a bias of a group of people as inherently dangerous while ignoring the broader context.
Selective storytelling is related to the genre of populism and not to classical rhetoric, as defined in chapter 1. Selective storytelling is populism and not classical rhetoric as it is based on the telling of a story. Selective storytelling does not try to refer to facts or numbers in the same way as classical rhetoric do.
Why facts fall flat
Similar stories could be handpicked about any selection of people that is large enough. Violent crime is present among all nations and ethnical groups, religious groups, and among people of all colours. But this is not a question about logics.
These emotional responses are still far stronger than dry statistical facts, such as evidence showing that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens as shown in chapter 10. BBC states that the Biden administration forced out two million people from USA between January 2021 and 11 May 2023.
Trump’s playbook: Stories that stoke emotions
Donald Trump has especially picked stories of sexually motivated murders done by undocumented immigrants. ABC News describes how Donald Trump repeated false claims that Kamala Harris had “over 647,572 migrant criminals for Kamala set loose to rape, pillage, plunder and kill the people in the United States of America” in rallies in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Reuter states that «Trumps attacks are from a well-thumbed playbook he has used repeatedly since first running for office in 2015 to cast immigrants illegally crossing the southern border as violent criminals.— He typically focuses on young, usually white, women allegedly killed by Hispanic.” For example:
- Jocelynn Nungaray: Trump used the story of the 12-year-old, allegedly killed by two undocumented Venezuelan men, to accuse President Biden of enabling rapists and murderers.
- Rachel Morin: Trump blamed Biden for the brutal murder of Morin by a man wanted for murder in El Salvador, connecting the crime to the administration’s border policies.
In both cases, the Trump campaign actively reached out to the victims’ families, incorporating their tragedies into campaign narratives. At rallies, grieving relatives called for stricter border controls, their stories stirring anger and fear among audiences.
The emotional edge
We can easily identify with the victim of a violent crime. It is also easier to identify with a single victim than with a group of victims. When we hear a story about a defenceless person that suffer a brutal crime, it rises our hormonal levels. This could also explain why arguments about immigration often are emotional.
The neuroscientist Paul J. Zak has worked on assessing the influence of storytelling. According to his research, our brain love stories because “as social creatures who regularly affiliate with strangers, stories are an effective way to transmit important information and values from one individual or community to the next. Stories that are personal and emotionally compelling engage more of the brain, and thus are better remembered, than simply stating a set of facts.”
Zak states that a dramatic story trigger our brains to send powerful hormones that control our emotions through our bodies. When Zak and his colleagues showed a dramatic film of a father and son struggling with cancer, they found that both cortisol and oxytocin spiked in nearly all of the viewers—and that most of them donated a portion of their earnings from the experiment to nonprofits.
Fear and anger makes you lose perspective
A sexually motivated murder is an especially morally disgusting crime. The perpetrator deliberately deprive the victim of her body, her feelings, her dignity and finally her life.
A story of a brutal crime against a defenceless victim trigger powerful emotions in us,- fear of the threat, empathy for the victim and outrage at the perpetrator on behalf of the victim. Fear and anger are blunt emotions in the way that they make you loose perspective. Anger make you feel strong and gives you a feeling of control over distress and fear. At the same time anger gives you “tunnel vision”, in the sense that you do not consider nuances or the broader picture.
The logical connection between these individual sexually motivated crimes and border policies of the competing political party is weak at best. Everybody who has been at a border control knows that it can be a a challenging situation with long queues, and that an individual error by a border officer can happen.
The Norwegian newspaper VG reports that the procedures were not followed, when the suspect of the murder of Morin was returned to Mexico instead of being held and DNA-tested. He should after the routines the have been extradited to El Salvador, where he was wanted. Instead, he managed to cross the border into USA on his forth attempt.
Yet, logic is not the point. The stories provoke strong emotional reactions and cries for action. The strong emotions easily drown out nuanced discussions, or if the cause of an individual crime in reality is the border control regime of the opposing political party. The emotions grab the attention of the audience, provides a political focus towards the portrayed problems and divert the attention from important political issues.
The bigger picture
Tunnel vision created by selective storytelling prevent us from seeing the broader picture. Selective storytelling is not about truth. It is about emotional impact. By focusing on individual tragedies, these narratives obscure broader realities and promote harmful stereotypes. These stories stir emotions, influence opinions, and advance political agendas.
To counter such tactics, it is essential to recognise the power of emotional narratives and to balance them with critical thinking and comprehensive perspectives. The truth is not just what is told, but also what is left out. If it is ment to be a general description of a group, remember the stories of all the people from minorities, immigrants and refugees who live their lives as peacefully as good citizens.