In the previous post, a link on “ludicrous and incompetent campaign” will take readers to an excellent Manhattan Contrarian essay documenting how Kamala Harris’s deliberately non-substantive campaign is the most “unserious” Presidential run in American history. That means that it is an honest link, doing what a link to another source is supposed to do: provide reference and authority.
This morning, I was reading Nate Silver’s Bulletin on substack. Nate, who is unalterably left-biased but tries really hard to pretend he’s not, was musing about Trump being too old to be running for President (he’s right about that) and gives us this sentence, with a link: “Considering the long history of old presidents seeking to hold onto power when they were clearly diminished — there were many such cases before Trump and Joe Biden — we should probably just have a Constitutional amendment that says a president can’t be older than 75 on Inauguration Day.”
“Really?” I thought. I think I’m a reasonably thorough and informed student of the American Presidency, and I’m not aware of “many such cases” before Biden. In fact, I can think of just one: FDR, who unforgivably ran for a fourth term in 1944 knowing that he was dying of heart failure. Roosevelt wasn’t particularly old, either: he was 63 when he died.
Seeking enlightenment from Silver on this fascinating topic, I clicked on the link. The link (to another Silver essay) does not show us “many cases” of “old” and “clearly diminished” Presidents seeking to hold on to office. It doesn’t give any examples other than Woodrow Wilson (he doesn’t mention FDR), and Silver’s evidence that Wilson was “seeking” to “hold onto office” before his stroke is like Obama once musing about how nice it would be to have a third term. Wilson told someone he thought he could win another term (he couldn’t). Silver also mentions Truman, who was neither decrepit nor diminished when he left office at 69. Until the Great Depression and World War II allowed Roosevelt—who would have kept running for more terms until he dropped, a true American dictator— to break the unwritten rule against more than two terms set by George Washington’s precedent, officially seeking a third elected term was taboo.
So Silver’s link falsely informed readers that there was authority for the statement it was linked to, and there was not. I should have written about the misleading link practice before, because it is increasingly common and it is unethical. I see it in the New York Times and the Washington Post; I see it on other blogs and substacks. Oh, the links don’t always go to sources that don’t fit the link description, that’s why the deceptive practice works.
False-linkers know that most people don’t click on links; they want to read one post, not two or five. So when they see Nate’s link on “many such cases,” they assume, reasonably enough, that the link will show them many such cases, and that’s all they want to know: Nate isn’t making this up. See, there’s a link to his source!
But he was making it up, and the link doesn’t support his assertion in the the post containing the link.
Link deceit is just an internet version of an earlier version of the practice that still is common: footnotes in scholarly works and case sites in legal documents that are not really what a reader will assume they are. I have a book right here on my desk, a historical tome, that has over 700 footnotes, many of them with nothing more than a book or published paper title and an author. I assume, with such footnotes, that they indicate there is authority for what the book author has written, but I won’t usually check the source footnoted. Almost nobody will. However, in the past, when writing my own scholarly articles, I have checked footnoted references, and sometime discovered that they were like Silver’s link—not what they were represented as supporting by the author. I am told by litigators that it is shocking how many cases cited in the memos and briefs they read contain cites that don’t stand for what the cite’s placement suggests, or in some instances, cites to cases that don’t exist.
Scholars do this at some risk: you never know when a Christoper Rufo might be checking on you. Lawyers doing it risk serious ethics sanctions. The journalists, bloggers and pundits who use this deceit, however, figure that the risks are minimal: if they are caught, they just say “Oopsie! I made a mistake!” and move on to the next article…and more misleading links.
Ethics Alarms 