Today, Explained - Why gaslighting is the word of the year
Episode Date: December 21, 2022It’s sooo 2016, but the word still mattered a lot in 2022. Merriam-Webster explains. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by ...Efim Shapiro, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Merriam-Webster's word of the year is gaslighting.
Psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time
that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts.
It's a bit of an odd choice because it feels like gaslighting might have been a better word of the year in like 2016, 2017.
One thing I can promise you this.
I will always tell you the truth.
We called up Merriam-Webster to ask if they're gaslighting us.
I used to write a monthly report back around 2002, 2003,
about which words were looked up the most every month in our online dictionary.
So I've been aware of our data, if you will,
kind of been working closely with it for more than 20 years.
A conversation with the dictionary, ahead on Today Explained.
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Yo, it's Malachi Lee.
I play 11 instruments and you're listening to Today Explained.
Another day, another Today Explained.
But this episode is different because today we're talking to Merriam-Webster,
or at least Merriam-Webster's editor-at-large, Peter Sokolowski.
We called him to ask why his dictionary ended up choosing gaslighting as its word of the year.
It's a statistical measure of what sent people to the dictionary in the past 12 months.
Because the dictionary does reveal a huge amount about the culture by the sort of spikes that happen on any given day.
That a certain word in the news or maybe in entertainment, the title of a movie, or the utterance of a newsmaker, or something like the death of Queen Elizabeth, for example, will send people to the dictionary to check words, to check definitions, maybe to check spellings.
And so we can measure that and then compare the current year with the past years.
And doing that, we find which word was looked up this current year that was not looked up in the past.
And that gives us a good measure of what sent people to the dictionary.
And that's our word of the year.
And is that how you landed on gaslighting this year? Absolutely. Yes, indeed. I mean, to be honest, it surprised me as much as anyone,
because I do look at this data on a daily basis and we do see the big spikes. For example,
the term Queen Consort was a big spike when Queen Elizabeth II died. Once known as the other woman,
Camilla is now the queen, kind of. The new king's darling wife has become
the queen consort. That term, that official term, queen consort, was suddenly really specific and
newsy, and so people looked it up. A consort supports his or her spouse, the monarch. That
normally means going on official trips, appearing in public on behalf of the royal family,
and supporting charities. In other words, that was a spike in our lookups that we could attach to a very specific story and a date in the news.
However, with gaslighting, it was a little different.
It was a word that kind of rose with the tide and stayed very high.
It was in our top 20 to 50 lookups on a daily basis.
And the raw tonnage of those numbers resulted in its clear victory as word of the year this year.
In other words, it wasn't attached to any single story.
It was the single word that many people looked up.
Tell us what those people found when they looked up the definition of gaslighting.
What is it?
We have two definitions for gaslighting.
I will begin with the older one because it reflects the origin of the term directly.
Gaslighting, the psychological manipulation of a person,
usually over an extended period of time, that causes the victim to question the validity of
their own thoughts or perception of reality. And that has to do with the characters in the
film and the play that preceded it called Gaslight, in which, you know, one of the principal characters,
the sort of evil husband,
attempts to make his wife believe that she's going insane.
Gregory, are you trying to tell me I'm insane?
It's what I'm trying not to tell myself.
But that's what you think, isn't it?
And his mysterious activities in the attic of their home
sometimes cause the gas lights of the house to dim.
And then he insists to her that the lights are not dimming and that she can't believe what she sees with her own eyes.
He said I was going out of my mind.
You're not going out of your mind. You're slowly and systematically being driven out of your mind.
Why? Why?
Perhaps because you found this letter no too much.
Or because then he would have control of your property, of this house.
And so that resulted in what psychologists call gaslighting.
Often that's an interpersonal kind of gaslighting,
when you're being sort of tricked by a partner or a family member or a colleague or a boss.
But that sense has broadened into, I think,
the sense that we encounter more frequently
or even most frequently today, which is simply the act or practice of grossly misleading someone,
especially for one's own advantage. And that kind of just means strategic lying, right? And that's
the sense that we see in headlines, often in political contexts. He continues to gaslight
the American people by acting like this pandemic
is not a real threat. This is one of those words that started with a kind of narrow,
specific definition and has broadened to a more general definition that's being adapted and
adopted by many people and many journalists. This is a favorite word for headlines.
To what can we attribute the resurgence of this word that comes from a movie that no one's seen?
That's right. You know, I don't know if it was a big hit, but it's a famous movie.
It starred, among other people, Angela Lansbury.
My name's Nancy, sir.
Who just died this year.
And we did actually see a little bump in lookups for gaslighting after her death
because the movie was mentioned in all of the obituaries.
And that sort of connects us to our own time in a certain
kind of way. In its narrow psychological sense, this term has been around since mid-century,
since the 50s and 60s. But we see a big jump in 2017, and then another jump every single year
since. This is a word that has really jumped into the public domain. If we can trace it to any single thing,
we can trace it to the Teen Vogue article from December 2016.
And the headline of that article is,
Donald Trump is gaslighting America.
Of course, this isn't the biggest electoral college victory in history.
It takes a simple Google search to figure that out.
But it's almost like these sort of distractions to divert our attention from the fact that
— This was a truly political use, obviously,
of this term.
But it also sent many people to the dictionary.
I think it was probably the first time many people encountered this term using this psychological
terminology on a kind of macro scale.
And of course, this is before Donald Trump took office.
This is after the election, but before the inauguration.
And as you might know, that article went viral, and it began this sort of pattern of journalists'
use of this term.
The president of the United States is gaslighting you, and you deserve to know.
If you look up this word in kind of news outlets, you see that this word is used increasingly in places
like the New York Times and news websites. And I think a lot of people who read Teen Vogue or
spend a lot of time online might have thought, you know, gaslighting would have been a better
word of the year in 2017. How did it become your word of the year five years later?
First of all, the dictionary acts as a kind of lag indicator of the culture, you know, to use economic terms. We don't recommend words. We don't propose words. We don't coin words. We
report on the words that are being used by many writers and journalists in many publications. And in this case, this is a
word that has had this momentum in the past few years. And also, in the past few years, I think
this is a reflection of a broader cultural fact. And that is simply that the technology that informs
us also deceives us. We live in an age of doubt. The whole notion of what people call the big lie,
that we can't trust our elections, and
a broader cultural conversation about the validity of elections.
And so the culture has absorbed this doubt that we all have to sort of view with skepticism,
whether it's, for example, a hacking problem of your own bank account or email or trolling
online. In other words, we have become
accustomed to the real threats to our identities and to our information. And a lot of that has to
do with disinformation or misinformation or deceitfulness. We have lots of synonyms in
English for lying, don't we? And this is a new synonym that brings a new idea,
which is that strategy,
you know, that gaslighting is very deliberate,
that it has a very specific goal.
And I think that goal is almost always understood
to be a nefarious goal, you know,
that really brings advantage to the teller of the lie.
These things have to do with whether or not
we trust our information, and gaslighting things have to do with whether or not we trust our information,
and gaslighting has everything to do with trust. Do you feel like when you made gaslighting the
word of the year that you were going to maybe divide some people or lose some people who look
at Merriam-Webster as a neutral player in our wars, in our various divisions.
Well, you bring up an important point, which is that the dictionary should serve as a neutral and objective arbiter of facts about language. And that is our mission. That is our goal. I
think the dictionary has always represented that, but never more than in an age of information.
But here's the thing. It's also, this word originated in interpersonal communication.
And this is a word that is used every bit
as much on the right as it is on the left.
The Biden administration is gaslighting America,
not only with their ill-conceived agenda,
but they are trying to make us believe
that what we actually see and are experiencing
is not happening at all.
Take, for example, the border.
So in many ways, this is a term
that is very broad in its application.
It's kind of universal in its appeal.
It seems like everybody's got a story about this kind of deception.
But the fact is the dictionary can't be afraid of reporting the truth about language.
And if that truth reveals something about our culture and our politics, which it often does,
then I think it's up to all of us to interpret that in our own way. I mean,
the dictionary is in some ways static, and the dynamic part find out how we were gaslit in 2022
and how social media platforms fared in the fight against disinformation.
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My name's Nancy, sir.
Today Explained is back. You've heard how gaslighting was chosen as word of the year, but now you're going to hear how we were gaslit in 2022. Samantha Bradshaw teaches about new technology and security at American University, and she says when she saw Merriam-Webster's choice, she somehow did not think of the 1944 film Gaslight starring Angela Lansbury. Instead, the choice evoked all the horrors of social media. Over the past year, in 2022, we've seen a series of high-profile events that have attracted
disinformation campaigns alongside them.
So Russia's ground invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was accompanied by large volumes
of disinformation on social media. And also during the U.S. 2022 midterms,
we saw disinformation being spread to undermine trust in the elections process and to polarize
American citizens. And I think, I guess, we expect disinformation in a war with Russia.
But tell people what happened during the 2022 midterms, because a lot of people might have
had a pretty unremarkable experience. Midterm elections aren't as high profile as general
elections. I have been every four years, but they're still really important. And this is where
we start to see some disinformation narratives that either kind of continue on larger discussions that have been happening around the general elections
or where we start to see actors test
and experiment with new narratives.
One interesting thing that happened
during the 2022 midterms
was the way that claims around ballot harvesting
or this idea that ballot boxes
are being filled with large numbers of illegally gained ballots motivated these watch parties.
A small group of people is gathering, watching and recording as voters return
early ballots at this drop box and election workers enter and exit.
These watch parties were essentially groups of people who would go out and monitor ballot
drop boxes around the country for this illegal activity. And I think what was really interesting
about these narratives was not only how the false and unsubstantiated claims around ballot harvesting fueled this real world action,
but also how a small number of really influential accounts on social media
participated in this very participatory process with their audiences,
where an influencer would share a message or a story and the audience would pick that up,
share it, retweet it, and organize various kind of
support groups on the ground. Money is everything. Money is the key in this world. This undercover
video purports to show a man engaging in the illegal practice of ballot harvesting,
paying voters for blank mail-in ballots, filling them out and mailing them en masse.
There were concerns that having groups of people monitor ballot boxes would lead to voter intimidation and that people wouldn't actually want to go up and drop off their
ballots because there was a large group of people who were gathering around them to make
sure that people weren't filling them with
illegal ballots. But we didn't see any actual harm caused by this, nor were any cases of
ballot harvesting actually identified by these groups. Sad for them.
In these cases of the Russia-Ukraine war, or even the 2022 U.S. midterms, who are the chief propagators of disinformation?
Is it regular people? Is it state actors? Do we even know in the case of Russia?
Different actors have different motivations for spreading disinformation online.
When it comes to the war in Ukraine, you know, we see state actors investing significantly in different kinds of tools to influence audiences for their own geopolitical ends. And, you know,
we often, I think it's really important here to also make
a distinction between overt and covert influence operations, because here we can think about the
way that state actors use the entire media ecosystem when they're pursuing foreign influence
operations. So, you know, state-backed media through broadcasters, in the case of Russia,
RT, they can have significant reach not only through television and broadcast, but also on
social media where they tend to generate large audiences. And this is even despite the fact that
there have been several sanctions placed on RT as a broadcaster. We look at its
reach around the world. It operates in multiple languages and platform companies haven't been as
successful at demoting or reducing the spread of non-English state-backed media coverage about the
war in other kinds of countries. And this is really interesting too,
because if you look at the covert operations of Russia and the way that they create fake accounts
and bots to automate the spread of misinformation, to amplify these narratives, they don't often generate as much engagement as they used to.
We haven't really seen recent disinformation campaigns that are using these kind of covert
strategies of creating fake accounts generate the same kind of reach.
And is that because social media companies are getting better at dealing with this after,
let's say,
the 2016 election and the 2020 election and the January 6th uprising?
Yeah, I think social media companies have really stepped up their game when it comes to identifying what they call coordinated inauthentic behavior, the fake accounts and the bots and the foreign influencers who are trying to game social media systems to
amplify the reach of their disinformation narratives and their disinformation campaigns.
What I think we're still struggling with has more to do with coordinated authentic behavior.
And this is also kind of how we're seeing misinformation change because it's not so much about having fake accounts or bots automate the spread of
this harmful content, but it's more about real people who are pushing these narratives through
their own personal social media account. But platforms don't have a good way of taking down content that come from
authentic users. There's an elephant in this gaslighting room, and it's in the shape of a
bird, I think. And so Twitter's going through this crisis over some of the very issues we're
talking about right now. Is that just going to be an issue for Twitter to resolve? Or do you think it has broader implications for other social media platforms?
I think with what's going on right now at Twitter, for me as an academic who uses a lot of social
media data to analyze disinformation networks and their effect on democracy more broadly, one of the biggest worries is that we're going to lose access to
a lot of the data and tools that make studying this phenomenon possible. Because right now,
we don't have very good insight into the way that social media actually changes people's
opinions and behaviors. We're only just starting to catch
up with digital technologies. Academic research can be slow. Like a lot of, you know, lawmaking
and policy, it takes time to develop studies, to test our hypothesis, to make sure things are
robust. And one of the big concerns with the Twitter takeover is that we're losing access to such a great resource for are moving to platforms that are much more closed, that are much harder to access, encrypted applications, smaller fringe alternative platforms like Gab, Parler, True Social, Telegram to an extent. I mean, it makes it much harder to understand how
the different affordances of these platforms are changing not only how mis- and disinformation
spreads, but the effect that it is having on everyday people and how they're eventually
going to formulate their political opinions or how they're going to go out and vote or whether or not they're going to show up at an event like January 6th.
It sounds almost like you're saying that having everyone in the same place accusing
each other of gaslighting is better than having everyone in, you know, 50 different social
media platforms where no one feels like they're being gaslit.
That is kind of what I'm saying.
That was Dr. Samantha Bradshaw, professor in new technology and security
at American University in Washington, D.C.
Early in the show, you heard from Merriam-Webster's
editor-at-large, Peter Sokolowski.
Peter's got a podcast.
It's called Word of the Day.
He's done like 6,000 episodes.
Nothing but respect, Peter.
This episode of Today Explained was produced by Halima Shah.
We were edited by Matthew Collette,
fact-checked by Laura Bullard,
and mixed and mastered by Afim Shapiro.
The rest of the team includes Abishai Artsy,
Hadi Mawagdi, Amanda Llewellyn,
Miles Bryan, Victoria Chamberlain,
Siona Petros, Paul Robert Mounsey,
and our supervising producer Amina Alsadi.
We had extra help this week from Jolie Myers.
We used music by Breakmaster Cylinder and Noam Hassenfeld.
I'm Sean Ramos-Verm.
My co-host is...
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