Prof. Richard M. Perloff
Distinguished Professor of Communication, Political Science, and Psychology at Cleveland State University. He has been a faculty member at Cleveland State since 1979, is widely known for his scholarship on the third-person effect, and is the author of The Dynamics of Persuasion (8th edition) and The Dynamics of Political Communication (3rd edition).
Email: R.PERLOFF@csuohio.edu
U.S. Election 2024
64. Reversion to the meme: A return to grassroots content (Dr Jessica Baldwin-Philippi)
65. From platform politics to partisan platforms (Prof Philip M. Napoli, Talia Goodman)
66. The fragmented social media landscape in the 2024 U.S. election (Dr Michael A. Beam, Dr Myiah J. Hutchens, Dr Jay D. Hmielowski)
67. Outside organization advertising on Meta platforms: Coordination and duplicity (Prof Jennifer Stromer-Galley)
68. Prejudice and priming in the online political sphere (Prof Richard Perloff)
69. Perceptions of social media in the 2024 presidential election (Dr Daniel Lane, Dr Prateekshit “Kanu” Pandey)
70. Modeling public Facebook comments on the attempted assassination of President Trump (Dr Justin Phillips, Prof Andrea Carson)
71. The memes of production: Grassroots-made digital content and the presidential campaign (Dr Rosalynd Southern, Dr Caroline Leicht)
72. The gendered dynamics of presidential campaign tweets in 2024 (Prof Heather K. Evans, Dr Jennifer Hayes Clark)
73. Threads and TikTok adoption among 2024 congressional candidates in battleground states (Prof Terri L. Towner, Prof Caroline Muñoz)
74. Who would extraterrestrials side with if they were watching us on social media? (Taewoo Kang, Prof Kjerstin Thorson)
75. AI and voter suppression in the 2024 election (Prof Diana Owen)
76. News from AI: ChatGPT and political information (Dr Caroline Leicht, Dr Peter Finn, Dr Lauren C. Bell, Dr Amy Tatum)
77. Analyzing the perceived humanness of AI-generated social media content around the presidential debate (Dr Tiago Ventura, Rebecca Ansell, Dr Sejin Paik, Autumn Toney, Prof Leticia Bode, Prof Lisa Singh)
It had to be the weirdest, but among the most disturbing examples of how political priming can be effectively used to spread disinformation. The case illustrates the intersection between the Trump presidential campaign, partisan media, and the rapid ricocheting of bogus claims across social media in a digital environment where truth can be difficult to determine but can be strategically exploited for political gain. The story illustrates the power of priming, a classical political psychological media effect where media messages access partisan attitudes and prejudices, channeling them to influence voting behavior.
Here is the backdrop. In recent years, Springfield, Ohio, a small city in southwestern Ohio, suffering from the strains of globalization, transformed its economy, in part by luring about 20,000 legal Haitian immigrants to work in manufacturing industries, boosting the financial health of the community. Although the influx of immigrants had a positive influence on the city’s economy, the sheer number of newcomers strained Springfield’s resources, likely accessing anti-immigrant attitudes among some, but by no means a majority, of the city’s residents. This negative affect was exacerbated by a tragic car accident in August 2023 that occurred when a Haitian resident, driving illegally, crashed into a school bus, killing an 11-year-old boy.
Although some of the stereotype seeds had been planted in the community, things calmed down until early September of 2024, when a Springfield resident, writing in a local Facebook group, claimed she heard that a neighbor’s daughter’s friend, who had lost her cat, discovered it was hanging from a tree branch at a Haitian neighbor’s house, butchered and carved up to be eaten. The rumor was false, but it linked up in some residents’ minds with online claims that Haitians were eating ducks and swans in city parks, also false. None of this would have had a political impact had the claims not been deliberately spread online by neo-Nazi groups, right-wing media influencers, disinformation platforms like InfoWars, and, in particular by the president of the conservative platform Turning Point USA, whose X post was viewed nearly 4 million times. It all played into a racist narrative with a long history in the U.S. that depicts foreigners as consuming undesirable animals and engaging in primitive bestial behavior, a narrative that congealed with prejudices some Americans harbored toward immigrants.
Immigration was the key. Republicans had been emphasizing immigration as a key national problem for years, developing its agenda-setting potential, even though undocumented immigrants exert little impact on the bulk of Americans and claims about their deleterious impact on jobs and crime were unfounded. But the time was ripe for priming.
Thus, on September 9, the day before the Trump-Harris debate, JD Vance tweeted that Springfield residents had pets eaten by “people who shouldn’t be in this country,” and Trump amplified it exponentially before a national audience of 67 million viewers at the presidential debate, claiming that illegal immigrants were “eating the pets of the people that live there.”
As cognitive psychological research suggests, the false association between illegal immigration and Haitians’ eating animals likely spread through sympathetic voters’ political cognitive networks, activating ideas linked in terms of their semantic meaning, such as misconceptions of immigration, and racial stereotypes, in this way helping to access prejudices allied with Trump’s political narrative. Republicans also sought, through priming, to make illegal immigration more accessible in memory so voters would be more likely to weight the agenda item heavily in their voting decisions, in hopes of producing a wave of Trump votes.
We don’t yet know the empirical effects that these priming efforts exerted on voting decisions. The misinformation clearly resonated with some pro-Trump voters, and its political impact is strongly suggested by research showing that conspiracy theories and falsehoods shared online amplify prejudices and strengthen confirmation biases about out-groups.
Not content to focus on the bizarre Springfield story, Trump sought to prime falsehoods about illegal immigration anew in October, claiming that government hurricane disaster-relief funds were spent to house illegal immigrants who crossed into the U.S. This disinformation too spread through online platforms, amplified by online opinion leaders’ affirmation, showing how the confluence of misinformation, partisan prejudices, and an intent to spread falsehoods can have modest, but politically consequential, effects on political attitudes.
Under particular conditions, fact-checks can alter incorrect beliefs such as these, but in today’s echo chamber environment, they are just not going to reach the highly partisan voters who are primed by misinformation, the falsehoods serving a variety of psychological and political functions.
Decades ago, scholars yearned for an era in which the major media hegemons were supplemented by politically diverse platforms in a more ideologically differentiated media ecosystem. It’s a “be careful what you wish for” moment, for now the platforms are more diverse, but populated by extremist actors who can manipulate the psychology of the information environment to influence beliefs that seem impervious to influence.