The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age

by Sasha Issenberg

How can political campaigns fight back against disinformation?

A decade after The Victory The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, which Politico called “Moneyball for politics,” journalist Sasha Issenberg returns to the cutting edge of political innovation to reveal how campaigns are navigating the era’s most pressing how to win in a world awash in lies.

The Lie Detectives is a lively and deep secret history of Democratic politics in the Trump years. Our main character, Jiore Craig, is a young but battle-hardened veteran of the misinformation wars, and she leads a memorable cast including LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, whose emergence as one of the American left’s biggest donors has forced his adviser Dmitri Mehlhorn into the role of moral compass for a movement still wrestling with whether it should counter fake news by producing its own, and David Goldstein and Jehmu Greene, who are confronting “the Big Lie,” in the vernacular of online conspiracy theories, with gifs, memes, and ugly graphics of their own.

The Lie Detectives presents a vivid snapshot of a political class trying to come to terms with an exploding social media landscape and using every weapon in its arsenal to counter the biggest threat it has ever faced to its way of doing business and winning power.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

209 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 12, 2024

About the author

Sasha Issenberg is the author of three previous books, on topics ranging from the global sushi business to medical tourism and the science of political campaigns. He covered the 2008 election as a national political reporter in the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe, the 2012 election for Slate, the 2016 election for Bloomberg Politics and Businessweek, and 2020 for The Recount. He is the Washington correspondent for Monocle, and has also written for New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and George, where he served as a contributing editor. He teaches in the political science department at UCLA.

Reviews

[Symski · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am fully aware that a couple weeks ago I faulted a political book for not using enough anecdotal evidence and basing itself entirely in conjecture, yet here I am to accuse this book of the opposite. The entirety of the "playbook" it offers for responding to disinformation consists of: 1. Don't act like it's special because it's online, disinformation has been happening since the dawn of time. And 2. Don't respond to something until you know it's actually damaging your campaign.

Fairly straightforward and common-sense. Would be a good start of a strategy... but as it is also the extent of it, it is fairly useless. I had been looking forward to reading about more specificity in how to construct a response if it is proven to affect your campaign. I am aware that having a staff show evidence to the contrary (like in the sleepy Joe example) or having the real information promoted by seemingly nonpartisan or across-the-aisle sources are more effective than having a candidate say "this is all lies!!!" but I would expect at least a little information on responses that are best-received if the candidate is directly addressed about the topic.

This book instead had a lot of filler information. It was a lot of information about specificities in the American and Brazilian elections, much of which strayed from the path of relevancy. Some of it was interesting, but it was definitely not what I picked up this book to learn about.

[Michael Erickson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author dedicates this book to his daughter, with the tagline, "may you live in less interesting times." Seems apt, considering how this book highlights a nascent industry of counter-disinformation firms that have sprung up in what feels like the very recent past. Within the past eight years our electoral systems went through a more significant change than appears on the surface.

This is more of a recap of events that have already happened rather than a set of guidelines to follow or a prognostication of things to come. Approach it more as a postmortem of the post-2016 environment, where Democratic and liberal electioneers were just trying every strategy to see what stuck. Turns out, quite a few different approaches worked, and the chapter detailing the 2017 Alabama special election to fill Senator Jeff Sessions' vacancy was particularly interesting.

Society may seem divided at the moment (and this isn't a uniquely American phenomenon; there was a good section devoted to the most recent Brazilian presidential election between Bolsonaro and Lula), but there are people who are learning how to penetrate social media echo chambers and introduce content that has real world effects on elections. It's a fascinating intersection of persuasion science and power, and campaigns can't ignore these new tools available to them.

[Mr. Book · Rating 2 out of 5]

You can also see this review, along with others I have written, at my new blog, Mr. Book's Book Reviews.

Mr. Book just finished The Lie Detectives: In Search Of A Playbook For Winning Elections In The Disinformation Age, by Sasha Isenberg.

There just isn’t much to say about this book. The book is just a collection of stories about election disinformation over the past few years, which no real theme to the book or solutions to the problem. The point of the book seems to simply be that lying takes place online. The whole entire content of the book could just be substituted for the preceding sentence and you wouldn’t miss anything by not reading it.

I give this book a C. Goodreads requires grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, a C equates to 2 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).
This review has been posted at my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews, and Goodreads.


Mr. Book originally finished reading this on June 17, 2024,

[Gaetano Venezia · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting exploration of the counterintuitive dynamics of information in the social media age: Sometimes it's better to confront lies than to ignore them, even getting out ahead of them; Traditional broadcast information may not be as effective as microinfluencers and intra-echo-chamber narratives. While the anecdotes and reporting are interesting, there's not enough data from diverse political systems over time to make general conclusions. The subtitle gives it away—this is "search for a playbook."

[Tamsin Engel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good book for someone with an introductory knowledge of disinformation. As someone who works in the field, I was hoping for something new or revolutionary and this was not that. I think the title is slightly misleading and implies that the author is proposing a new way to counter disinformation when the book is really just a history of disinformation. That being said, I would recommend it to anyone who is curious about how disinformation spreads and what people are doing to try to stop it.

[Abel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A behind-the-scenes a look at some of the ongoing efforts to counter the reactionary fake news industry that is seeking to control the post-2008 global order. It is primarily focused on the USA, with a secondary focus on Brazil, and a few mentions in passing of other places.

I do find the topic very interesting, and the books is well-written, hence the 5 stars review (thought personally I would have preferred an even more global focus).

[Andreas Tovefalk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sasha Issenbergs have writen an very intresting and scary book about misinformation in elections and on social media. I feel that the book could have gone deeper and show how the information is spread, what makes it so attractive to voters. It feels like this book is a good start, an introduction to understand what is happening out in the world. I was left with so many answers.

[Jay Molette · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book recounts a lot of the type of online disinformation that is rampant in our politics and some of the people working to fix it. Not many solutions are offered, but you definitely grow an appreciation for the folks working to stop that disinformation.

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Describes a huge cast of political operatives and recaps events that have happened, but doesn’t really offer much in the way of a solution for disinformation.

[Cleo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sasha Issenberg’s The Lie Detectives offers a detailed account of the increasingly sophisticated disinformation techniques that since 2016 have become a major factor in American elections — as well as the emerging actors and tools to combat them. It’s an interesting dissection of disinformation and counter disinformation efforts in 2016, 2020, and 2022. Focusing on a handful of characters, its main subjects are the actors within and outside of the Democratic apparatus who are working on understanding how disinformation spreads and how to combat it. The book offers some fascinating insights into the nature of disinfo and counter-disinfo strategies - including the ways in which many counter-disinformation strategies mirror that which they seek to counteract...