Now that the holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy case is getting the negative attention he deserves, it’s easy for District Attorney Tim Cruz to agree to a plea deal that gets Lindsay the help she needs. Between now and when the deal goes through, we need to talk about how and why social media caused so much needless distress in this case.
The jurors voted 11-1 for insanity. This indicates that public opinion breaks down along similar lines. So why does social media make it seem like the public divide is closer to 50-50?
The answer is money. An enormous amount of money is being spent elevating story lines that have nothing to do with how people really feel.
It’s not that we wouldn’t otherwise pay attention. A mother killing her children has a baseline of sensationalism simply because it’s profoundly sad and extremely uncommon. But the case would not have garnered so much attention if so-called “social media influencers” hadn’t been paid to talk about the case using carefully selected us vs. them narratives that pit people against each other like it’s a sporting event.
It’s human nature to choose sides. As a species we’re drawn to legal disputes and we crave resolutions that line up with our internalized ideas about how the world works. PR firms get paid a lot to exploit this aspect of the human condition. The question is, who would have a financial incentive to promote false controversies in Lindsay Clancy’s case?
One possibility is the insurance companies that represent the mental health professionals who are being sued by the Clancy family. Between the horrific loss of three small children and the unbearable pain that will consume the family for a lifetime, a jury could easily award the Clancy family 500 million or more. This gives the insurance companies a powerful reason to spend a ton of money elevating story lines that generate negative attention, especially toward Lindsay. The more the public dislikes Lindsay, the greater the chance a jury will assign some of the blame to her, thus award less money to the family. Even ridiculous stories about the children’s father being the real killer help insurance companies save money by reducing sympathy for him.
PR firms promote only certain story lines – and they pay influencers and bot farms to spread them. Bot farms are especially dangerous because they manufacture completely fake people on platforms like X, TikTok and Facebook to make it look like hundreds of thousands of people feel a certain way even though the real number is exponentially smaller.
With enough money, a PR firm can create seemingly sincere narratives that have nothing to do with reality. The more money an insurance company stands to lose in a lawsuit, the more money they will spend on PR. It’s expensive but effective. Indeed, a bot farm company can simply push a button and create an endless loop of posts that make it look like half the population believes women are running around killing their babies for fun.
Anything that makes people hate Lindsay and Patrick Clancy is good for the insurance companies, and PR firms know how to inflame hatred. Pitting women against men and liberals against conservatives barely needs a match to ignite, and insurance companies have enough money to buy up all the matchbooks.
Dark money industries like porn and sex trafficking also benefit from propaganda that misleads people into thinking women are just as violent as men. They aren’t. Not even close. 90% of people who kill children are men. 95% of people who commit rape are men. Nearly all people who kill and rape women are men. I could go on. Lindsay’s case isn’t about porn and sex trafficking, but the men who make money in these industries are only too happy to jump on the hate-women bandwagon because it’s good for profits.
Social media influencers won’t admit that they get paid to promote certain narratives, so it’s hard for the public to see what’s going on. But it’s obvious if we remember what Orwell taught us in his classic novel 1984 when he wrote about the dangers of propaganda. “The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.” Orwell understood better than most how easy it is to force people to accept ideas that make no sense. He called it doublethink, the ability to be “conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies.”
Orwell didn’t care that we might repeat a lie as if true – but he was very worried that we might lose the intellectual ability and willingness to QUESTION whether information is true. More importantly, he was concerned that we might one day become so stupid we’d stop being skeptical even when, as in Lindsay’s case, obviously false information is tethered to a price tag.
1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual.
Plymouth DA Timothy Cruz responds to a reporter as he leaves Plymouth Superior Court amid a throng of media earlier this month. (AP Photo/Josh Reynolds, File)
Activist Jake Lang protests outside of Plymouth Superior Court during the Lindsay Clancy trial. (Mark Stockwell/Boston Herald)
Aimee Breault of Acushnet joins a demonstration in support of Lindsay Clancy outside Plymouth Superior Court last month. (AP Photo/Josh Reynolds )
