This post was written for and originally
published by the Institute of Network Cultures as part of the Dispatches
from Ukraine: Tactical Media Reflections and Responses publication.
It also benefited from copy editing by Chloë Arkenbout, and proofreading
by Laurence Scherz.
Tackling disinformation and misinformation is a problem that is
important, timely, hard… and, in no way new. Throughout history,
different forms of propaganda, manipulation, and biased reporting have
been present and deployed — consciously or not; maliciously or not — to
steer political discourse and to goad public outrage. The issue has
admittedly become more urgent lately and we do need to do something
about it. I believe, however, that so far we’ve been focusing on the
wrong parts of it.
Consider the term “fake news” itself. It feels like a new invention
even though its literal use was
first recorded in 1890. On its face it means “news that is untrue”,
but of course, it has been twisted and abused to claim that certain
factual reporting is false or manufactured — to a point where its
very use might suggest that a person using it not being entirely
forthright.
That’s the crux of it; in a way, “fake” is in the eye of the
beholder.
Matter of trust
While it is possible to define misinformation
and disinformation,
any such definition necessarily relies on things that are not easy
(or possible) to quickly verify: a news item’s relation to truth,
and its authors’ or distributors’ intent.
This is especially valid within any domain that deals with complex
knowledge that is highly nuanced, especially when stakes are high and
emotions heat up. Public debate around COVID-19 is a chilling example.
Regardless of how much “own research” anyone has done, for those without
an advanced medical and scientific background it eventually boiled down
to the question of “who do you trust”. Some trusted medical
professionals, some didn’t (and still don’t).
As the world continues to assess the harrowing consequences of the
pandemic, it is clear that the misinformation around and disinformation
campaigns about it had a real cost, expressed in needless human
suffering and lives lost.
It is tempting, therefore, to call for censorship or other sanctions
against misinformation and disinformation peddlers. And indeed, in many
places legislation is already in place that punishes them with fines or
jail time. These places include Turkey
and Russia,
and it will surprise no one that media organizations are sounding alarms
about them.
The Russian case is especially relevant here. On the one hand, the
Russian state insists on calling their war of aggression against Ukraine
a “special military operation” and blatantly
lies about losses sustained by the Russian armed forces, and about
war
crimes committed by them. On the other hand, Kremlin appoints itself
the arbiter of truth and demands that any news organizations in Russia
propagate these lies on its behalf — using “anti-fake news” laws as
leverage.
Disinformation peddlers are not just trying to push specific
narratives. The broader aim is to discredit the
very idea that there can at all exist any reliable,
trustworthy information source. After all, if nothing is trustworthy,
the disinformation peddlers themselves are as trustworthy as it gets.
The target is trust itself.
And so we apparently find ourselves in an impossible position:
On one hand, the global pandemic, a war in Eastern Europe, and the
climate crisis are all complex, emotionally charged high-stakes issues
that can easily be exploited by peddlers of misinformation and
disinformation, which thus become existential threats that urgently need
to be dealt with.
On the other hand, in many ways, the cure might be worse than the
disease. “Anti-fake news” laws can, just
like libel laws, enable malicious actors to stifle truthful but
inconvenient reporting, to the detriment of the public debate, and the
debating public. Employing censorship to fight disinformation and
misinformation is fraught with peril.
I believe that we are looking for solutions to the wrong aspects of
the problem. Instead of trying to legislate misinformation and
disinformation away, we should instead be looking closely at how is it
possible that it spreads so fast (and who benefits from this). We should
be finding ways to fix the media funding crisis; and we should be making
sure that future generations receive the mental tools that would allow
them to cut through biases, hoaxes, rhetorical tricks, and logical
fallacies weaponized to wage information wars.
Compounding the problem
The reason why misinformation and disinformation spread so fast is
that our most commonly used communication tools had been built in a way
that promotes that kind of content over fact-checked, long-form, nuanced
reporting.
According
to Washington Post, “Facebook programmed the algorithm that decides
what people see in their news feeds to use the reaction emoji as signals
to push more emotional and provocative content — including content
likely to make them angry.”
When this is combined with the fact that “[Facebook’s] data
scientists confirmed in 2019 that posts that sparked [the] angry
reaction emoji were disproportionately likely to include misinformation,
toxicity and low-quality news”, you get a tool fine-tuned to spread
misinformation and disinformation. What’s worse, the more people get
angry at a particular post, the more it spreads. The more angry
commenters point out how false it is, the more the algorithm promotes it
to others.
One could call this the “outrage dividend”,
and disinformation benefits especially handsomely from it. It is related
to “yellow
journalism”, the type of journalism where newspapers present little
or no legitimate, well-researched news while instead using eye-catching
headlines for increased sales, of course. The difference is that
tabloids of the early 20th century didn’t get the additional boost from
a global communication system effectively designed to promote
this kind of content.
I am not saying Facebook intentionally designed its platform
to become the best tool a malicious disinformation actor could dream of.
This might have been (and probably was) an innocent mistake, an
unintended consequence of the way the post-promoting algorithm was
supposed to work.
But in large systems, even tiny mistakes compound to become huge
problems, especially over time. And Facebook happens to be a gigantic
system that has been with us for almost two decades. In the immortal
words of fictional Senator Soaper: “To err is human, but to really
foul things up you need a computer.”
Of course, the solution is not as simple as just telling Facebook and
other social media platforms not to do this. What we need (among other
things) is algorithmic
transparency, so that we can reason about how and
why exactly a particular piece of content gets promoted.
More importantly, we also need to decentralize
our online areas of public debate. The current situation in which we
consume (and publish) most of our news through two or three global
companies, who effectively have full control over our feeds and over our
ability to reach our audiences, is untenable. Monopolized,
centralized social media is a monoculture where mind viruses can spread
unchecked.
It’s worth noting that these monopolistic monocultures (in both the
policy and software sense) are a very enticing target for anyone who
would be inclined to maliciously exploit the algorithm’s weaknesses. The
post-promoting algorithm is, after all, just software, and all software
has bugs. If you find a way to game the system, you get to reach
incredibly numerous audiences. It should then come as no surprise that
most
vaccine hoaxes on social media can be traced back to only 12
people.
Centralization obviously also relates to the ability of billionaires
to just
buy a social network wholesale or the inability (or unwillingness)
of mainstream social media platforms to deal
with abuse and extremism. They all stem from the fact that a handful
of for-profit companies control the daily communication of several
billion people. This is too few companies to wield that kind of power,
especially when they demonstrably wield it so
badly.
Alternatives do already exist. Fediverse, a decentralized social
network, does not have a single company controlling it (and no shady
algorithm deciding who gets to see which posts), and does not have to
come up with a single set of rules for everyone on it (an impossible
task, as
former Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, admits). Its decentralized nature
(there are thousands of servers run by different people and groups, with
different rules) means that it’s
easier to deal with abuse. And since it’s not controlled by a single
for-profit company there is no incentive to
keep bad actors in so as not to risk an outflow of users (and thus a
drop in stock prices).
So we can start by at least setting up a presence in the Fediverse
right now (following thousands of users who
migrated there after Elon Musk’s Twitter bid). And, we can push for
centralized social media walled gardens to be forced
to open their protocols, so that their owners no longer can keep us
hostage. Just like the ability to move a number between mobile providers
makes it easier for us to switch while keeping in touch with our
contacts, the ability to communicate across different social
networks would make it easier to transition out of the walled gardens
without losing our audience.
As far as funding is concerned, entities spreading disinformation
have at least three advantages over reliable media and fact-checking
organizations.
First, they can be bank-rolled
by actors who do not care if they turn a profit. Secondly, they
don’t have to spend any money on actual reporting, research,
fact-checking, and everything else that is both required and
costly in an honest news outlet. Third, as opposed to a lot of
nuanced long-form journalism, disinformation benefits greatly from the
aforementioned “outrage dividend” — it is easier for
disinformation to get the clicks, and create ad revenues.
Meanwhile, honest media organizations are squeezed from every
possible side. Not the least by the very platforms that gate-keep their
reach, or provide (and pay for) ads on their websites.
Many organizations, including small public grant-funded outlets, find
themselves in a position where they feel they have to pay
Facebook for “reach”; to
promote their posts on its platform. They don’t benefit from the outrage
dividend, after all.
In other words, money that would otherwise go into paying journalists
working for a small, often embattled media organization, gets funneled
to one of the biggest tech companies in the world, which consciously
built their system as a “roach motel” — easy to get in, very hard to
get out once you start using it — and now exploits that to extract
payments for “reach”. An economist might call it “monopolistic
rent-seeking”.
Meanwhile, the biggest ad network operator, Google, uses
their similar near-monopoly position to extract an ever larger share of
ad revenues, leaving less and less on the table for media
organizations that rely on them for their ads.
All this means that as time goes by it gets progressively harder to
publish quality fact-checked news. This is again tied to centralization
giving a few Big Tech companies the ability to control global
information flow and extract rents from that.
A move to non-targeted, contextual ads might be worth a shot — some
studies show that targeted
advertising offers quite limited gains compared to other forms of
advertising. At the same time, cutting out the rent-seeking middle man
leaves
a larger slice of the pie on the table for publishers. More public
funding (perhaps funded
by a tax levied on the mega-platforms) is also an idea worth
considering.
Finally, we need to make sure our audiences can understand what
they’re reading, along with the fact that somebody might
have vested interests in writing a post or an article in a particular
way. We cannot have that without robust media literacy education in
schools.
Logic and rhetoric have long been banished from most public schools
as, apparently, they are not useful for finding a job. Logical fallacies
are barely (if at all) covered. At the same time both misinformation and
disinformation rely heavily on logical fallacies. I will not be at all
original when I say that school curricula need to emphasize critical
thinking, but it still needs to be said.
We also need to update the way we teach, to fit the current world.
Education is still largely built around the idea that information is
scarce and the main difficulty is acquiring it (hence its focus on
memorizing facts and figures). Meanwhile, for at least a decade if not
more, information is plentiful, and the difficulty lies in filtering it
and figuring out which information sources to trust.
Solving the right problem,
together
“Every complex problem has a solution which is simple, direct,
plausible — and wrong”, observed H. L. Mencken. This describes the push
for seemingly simple solutions to the misinformation and disinformation
crisis, like legislation making disinformation (however defined)
“illegal”, well.
News and fact-checking communities have limited resources. We cannot
afford to spend them on ineffective solutions — and much less on
in-fighting about proposals that are both highly controversial and
recognized broadly as dangerous.
To really deal with this crisis we need to recognize centralization —
of social media, of ad networks, of media ownership, of power over our
daily communication, and in many other areas related to news publishing
— and poor media literacy among the public as crucial underlying causes
that need to be tackled.
Once we do, we have options. Those mentioned in this text are just
rough ideas; there are bound to be many more. But we need to start by
focusing on the right parts of the problem.