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If you read just one thing…

...read about the revolutionary re-mapping of Khartoum.

A lyrical essay [[link removed]]by Amar Jamal describes the methods Sudanese demonstrators used to end Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir’s 30-year reign over the country. With a combination of digital organizing and classic urban guerilla tactics like barricades and smoking tire fires, Sudanese activists changed the map of Khartoum from one that Bashir’s forces knew well to one legible only to those in the freedom movement. As security services tried to traverse a city newly unknown to them, “revolutionaries retreated inside houses, climbing onto roofs to film the dullness and stupidity of their assailants, the police cars falling into the traps the people had set up for them.” That footage became a powerful mobilization tool, showing people that they could triumph over the state’s repressive apparatus.

Perceptions of China in Africa

“Great Power Competition” is a thing American policymakers say right before they ask for any random thing they want, and no one relies on that crutch more often than the people who control US policy toward Africa. Nearly everything in US Africa policy is animated by a loose sense that the US is falling behind China in Africa. How do Africans feel about this putative competition? Mixed at best, according to the latest public opinion data from Afrobarometer [[link removed]].

The Afrobarometer survey measured public opinion in 18 African countries. A plurality preferred an American development model to a Chinese one, but there was major divergence between countries. Support for a Chinese development model nearly doubled in Burkina Faso between 2015 and today, but it halved in Namibia during the same time period.

China’s perceived economic influence has declined overall since 2015, with only 56% of respondents saying that China has “some” or “a lot” of influence over African domestic economies, down from 71% in 2015.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Who cares about women in combat?

A new study [[link removed]] finds that Americans don’t care at all about the gender of the service members killed in US wars overseas. In a survey experiment, researchers found that support for a hypothetical conflict didn’t significantly vary based on whether there were women among the reported US battle fatalities.

Having women among the dead did increase support for gender equality overall, but only among women respondents.

The egalitarian apathy found by the study challenges a lot of the rhetoric deployed against the idea of allowing women to serve in combat roles in the military. Opponents have alleged that women dying in combat will erode public support for US wars.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Disinfo Wars: Part II

Last week, we looked at new research on whether “disinformation” — in the form of elite rhetoric — actually moves the needle on people’s understanding of their political world. Today, we’ll delve into research on people who insist that we are all under threat from the lies politicians tell in the course of their work, and that the only way to combat that threat is by interjecting at every turn to say “well, actually.” We are in a golden age for professional fact checkers, with researchers working overtime at the Washington Post, CNN, and elsewhere to expose every made up statistic or erroneous accusation that passes US political leaders’ lips. Yet, according to those same fact checkers, despite all that checking we also live in a golden age of political lying.

Social scientists Alexander Bor, Mathias Osmundsen, Stig Rasmussen, Anja Bechmann, and Michael Petersen begin to investigate that paradox in a new working paper [[link removed]]. They look at a particular subset of fact checkers — organizations that make snazzily-produced videos urging viewers to improve their media literacy to avoid being taken in by disinformation. Their research approach was simple but effective: They gathered six of the best of those videos, and randomly assigned them to 1,600 Twitter-using respondents. Then they asked the respondents to tell truth from fiction to see how well the videos worked.

The results, of course, depend on your definition of “worked.” The videos did make people better at sorting factual claims and compelling lies. In fact, watching the videos had about as much an effect on what the researchers called a respondent’s “truth discernment score” as whether the respondents had graduated from college. Those saddled with student debt may not appreciate those apples, but for fact checking advocates it’s a very positive result.

If you think that improved self knowledge translates to a change in behavior around disinformation, however, think again. Bor et al. tracked the respondents’ Twitter behavior after showing them the videos, and measured the amount of disinformation the respondents shared in the three months before and nine weeks after the study. The people who had seen the videos — the same ones who improved their ability to discern truth — shared 55% more disinformation in the weeks after seeing the videos than the researchers predicted based on what they’d shared beforehand. That measure is statistically noisy due to the high variation in people’s Twitter behavior, but the upshot is this: There was no evidence that watching fact checking videos actually made people less likely to spread disinformation.

That result, the authors suggest, calls into question the idea that disinformation sharing and truth discernment are particularly related. Within the study sample, Bor et al. found no significant correlation between truth discernment score and disinformation sharing. Instead, they found that age was the number one predictor of sharing disinformation on Twitter — older people are hugely more likely to post disinformation than younger people. That was true despite the fact that there is no age distinction whatsoever in truth discernment scores. Older people are just as able to tell truth from fiction as younger people, but it apparently has no effect on their willingness to spread false information.

Former President Barack Obama last week said [[link removed]], “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work.” Yet, as the Bor et al. results show, it seems unlikely that we are in a true “epistemological crisis” where people of different political stripes are living in distinct realities. Instead, disinformation serves as a tool for people to achieve discrete political goals — some of which their neighbors would like to believe are merely the result of mass delusion.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Shirin Jaafari spoke [[link removed]] to analysts about the potential for the US military to finally withdraw from Afghanistan. Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller has said that the US will draw down its presence to 2,500 troops by Jan. 15, prompting relief in some quarters and concern in others. President Trump has long promised to end US military involvement in Afghanistan and other conflict zones, but the Pentagon has dragged its feet on implementing withdrawal orders. The Afghan government, analysts say, is prepared to lose support from US troops, even though it might prefer to retain them through peace talks with the Taliban.

Zach Stone decried [[link removed]] whining by Republicans in Congress about the potential cost of a nationwide COVID-19 relief package. Stone, a budget expert, pointed out that the federal government wastes billions of dollars on spending it classifies as national security — the Pentagon budget — but balks at spending money to secure people during a pandemic. 40 million Americans are at risk of eviction, and yet the Defense Department, which failed [[link removed]] its third consecutive audit last week, receives an apparently sacrosanct $740 billion in annual funding that cannot be used to keep people in their homes.

Rebecca Rosman reported [[link removed]] on responses to French president Emmanuel Macron’s claims that France faces a threat from what he calls “Islamic separatism.” Macron has proposed a law regulating Islamic religious practice in France, on the grounds that Muslims in France are insufficiently interested in being French. Actual French Muslims Rosman spoke to, however, found the charge confusing. As one woman told her, “French Muslims don’t want to be independent from the state. [Macron’s] word separatism gives the wrong impression.”

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

Here’s [[link removed]] a tasty research agenda just waiting for an enterprising graduate student who wants to study whether rebel groups with pre-existing Thin Mint endowments are more violent toward civilians than those with Tagalongs (or whether that whole debate is nonsense and violence is actually determined by which merit badges are most prized).

The Fletcher School at Tufts University famously (and confoundingly) awards graduates a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy, but the school apparently didn’t consult any of the lawyers on the faculty when it designed its new crest. [[link removed]]

Before the referendum, pro-Brexit British politicians promised that continental Europe would be practically begging to sign trade deals that favored British companies after the UK left the European Union. Now, the Dutch government is encouraging what seems very much like a Brexit [[link removed]] domination [[link removed]] kink [[link removed]]among Dutch small business owners, so that’s how that’s going.

Challenge coins were a bad [[link removed]] invention [[link removed]].

President-elect Biden will nominate Tony Blinken to be his secretary of state, which will regrettably shorten the title [[link removed]] that he last held in public service: “Deputy Secretary Tony Blinken From The State Department.”

At his confirmation hearing, he is expected to direct senators to check out his SoundCloud [[link removed]].

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