“Data flooding”, a technique known in English as “firehosing”, and “Gish galloping” (overwhelming with misleading arguments) are disinformation tactics, understood as “the intentional dissemination of non-rigorous information”, which are intended to distort reality with the aim of destabilizing, as well as obtaining political advantages, and which are commonly used in debates.
In practice, they assume that if one of the speakers offers a lot of information to his opponent, he does not have time to reflect and refute or corroborate them.
Examples of this have been seen in the current campaign for the elections on July 23, which this Wednesday once again summons the candidates of the PSOE, Vox and Sumar in a debate that the PP will not attend because its head of the list, Alberto Núñez Feijóo , has declined to participate in it.
Núñez Feijóo and the PSOE candidate for re-election, Pedro Sánchez, already staged a confrontation on the 10th in which both offered a large amount of numerical information and relatively complex economic concepts and in which they shared, according to several experts consulted by EFE Check, the strategy of exposing data to confuse.
“The voter is left without knowing who is right,” summarizes Cristina Tardáguila, founder of the Brazilian verification agency Lupa.
According to the former deputy director of the International Verification Network (IFCN), these tactics are used “when there is something weird or wrong that you want to leave out, you create another story and you get a lot of people talking about it.” history”.
The way to do it, he explains about the “firehosing” also used in the time of Donald Trump in the United States, is to launch “a huge stream of information so that people start worrying about other things.”
The professor of Journalism at the Carlos III University of Madrid Carlos Elías maintains that in this disinformation technique “not all the data is false, but some are taken to support the argumentative proposal of those who use it.”
Tardáguila shares this premise, since normally it is about “a succession of true data but delicately chosen by one or the other to attack or defend themselves”.
Elías, who also holds the Jean Monnet EU Chair, Disinformation and “Fake News”, adds that “the number of unemployed is not the same as the number of Social Security affiliates”.
“A piece of information can be positive for the Government and another negative and the opponent has to enter the field of technical explanations that differentiate one from the other,” he explains. “Therefore, he doesn’t have time to spread his message,” he concludes.
“What these data flooding techniques and the normalization of lies and disinformation achieve is indifference to the data and also to the arguments,” says Astrid Wagner, senior scientist at the Institute of Philosophy of the CSIC (Consejo Superior de Scientific Research).
Wagner assures that “everything that counts in politics in the end is found on the emotional and identity level.”
Gestures, tone, security or nervousness “become crucial” in debates, regardless of the content, adds this researcher.
Wagner, who advises the Forum against Disinformation Campaigns of the Government of Spain, concludes that “sadly, the attitudes that are rewarded in debates are the most aggressive and offensive, never the conciliatory, understanding, or healthy critical and self-critical ones.”
In this context, another of the key points in political debates is, for Cristina Tardáguila, “the lack of moderation, which is exposing the political zoo, the difficulty that politicians have in actually making policies, which is sitting down and talk about issues that matter to the country and not to themselves.
This article is part of the content disseminated by Comprobado.es, an alliance of verifiers and media to fight against misinformation about the general elections on July 23.
