By David Hyde, Professor of Sociology, South Puget Sound Community College, Local 4603
“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after…”
-Jonathan Swift, The Examiner, 1710
If we can be sure of anything, it’s that the spreading of false information to sway the public is not new. Over a century ago, Senator Hiram Johnson noted “When war is declared, truth is the first casualty.” The term propaganda dates to the early 1600’s. Religious in origin, it referred to a “propagation of the faith.”
But with the 2022 midterms looming, the rise of “information warfare,” claims of “fake news,” and our relationship with social media, perhaps it’s a good time to examine misinformation.
Whether maliciously or innocently, we are regularly subjected to inaccurate information. Commercial claims of miracle medical treatments or the ultimate luxury getaway to the Fyre Festival have taught us to be skeptical of those trying to sell us something. Sometimes. Statistica reports that annual spending on advertising in the U.S. is approaching $300 billion. Corporate America would not spend that kind of money without getting a predictable return on its investment.
While not all advertising involves overt lying, the point stands: messaging and information, regardless of the subject or the veracity of the claims, will reliably persuade some portion of the population to consume products, click on links, donate money, hold views, or vote a certain way.
After the 2020 election, the news sources people used strongly predicted their opinions on the reliability of the results of the election. Last month, researchers David Broockman and Joshua Kalla at UC Berkeley reported results of an experiment in which Fox news viewers were paid to watch CNN regularly for a month. The study found that many of those viewers, self-identified conservatives, changed their views on the legitimacy of the election after exposure to a contrary media source. Similarly, some study participants changed views on Trump, Biden, and pandemic policies as well. The conclusion was significant: people don’t just gravitate to news sources with which they already agree, they are also persuaded by what they view.
Misinformation is abundant. Sometimes it’s a fringe “conspiracy theorist” spreading disinformation for some ideological or financial purpose (Alex Jones’s claims about Sandy Hook). Other times it’s a well-meaning, but ultimately inaccurate call to action that spreads like wildfire on social media (The film Kony 2012 united internet users to demand Joseph Kony be removed from political power in Uganda…six years after he had been). Sometimes the mainstream press gets the story wrong (As happened with the Covington Catholic high school students wrongly accused of harassing an elderly Native American activist in 2019). Sometimes the government distorts the truth (consider the Gulf of Tonkin incident or some of what we’ve heard about the war in Ukraine that later turned out false). And sometimes the press and state work together to amplify misinformation, as occurred in the lead up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Claims that Iraq had significantly developed WMD’s and had been responsible for the 9/11 attacks were both later proven false).
As individuals, we may also get the story wrong. Confirmation bias leads us to seek out sources which concur with our preconceptions and avoid those which challenge what we think we know. The Dunning-Krueger effect, which holds that the less someone knows about a topic, the more they overestimate their knowledge of it, encourages us to double down on our narratives, even when presented with conflicting information.
But our misinformation problems today are not only the result of personal cognitive biases. We increasingly rely on social media for news. A 2021 Pew poll found that 86% of Americans get much of their news digitally, and a little more than half routinely use social media as a significant source of information. Similar to confirmation bias, we are surrounded by social media peers who think like we do, resulting in “idea bubbles” of unchallenged groupthink, where “everyone we know believes this to be true.” More ominously, tech companies have designed algorithms that ensure that rather than seeing a balanced or random stream of news, we are prompted to engage with content that reenforces what we already believe or is designed to spur our outrage. Because social media relies on our connections to friends and family, we may subconsciously trust and value the content more than we might if it were in a newspaper, even when it’s of lower quality. And the quality is often low, including plagiarized information, misquotes, pictures of older events presented as new, and “deep fakes,” photos or videos presented as evidence that were altered or wholly created digitally. Information presented as fact may be wrong and might even be deliberately propagated by those who have interests other than a well-informed public.
Institutional efforts to “fix” social media’s misinformation problem are unlikely to be successful. Attempts to censor inaccurate content often backfire; much misinformation gets through while at least some important investigative reporting or whistleblowing gets buried. It also raises the question, “who would we want to be the censor?” A small handful of tech billionaires who likely don’t share all our views or priorities, and have agendas of their own? Government employees? Of which party? Do we think appointees of Donald Trump and Joe Biden define the same things as “fake news?”
Personal steps can be taken to ensure the best information to make informed decisions. Begin by treating everything a bit skeptically, including the sources you read and your own knowledge and analysis. Get as close to the raw information as possible. Do you know and trust the source? Is it a firsthand account (not someone else forwarding something labeled as a firsthand account)? Local news is often more reliable for local issues simply because there is more interpersonal accountability. Doctors, teachers, attorneys, journalists, and others you have personal connections to, and organizations (schools, civic clubs, unions) you have a history with may earn your trust over time with information that turns out to be consistently accurate. Read divergent ideological perspectives, critiques of media, and the foreign press. Look for multiple sources verifying the same information. When several ideologically opposed publications agree on some basic facts, there’s a good chance those facts are accurate.
Ultimately our strongest tool against misinformation may be education. Ask yourself if the news seems probable, given the history of the situation and the interests of those involved. Those who know history, understand context, and are familiar with different perspectives are difficult to deceive.