The Scourge of Misinformation
What I read (you can also listen to the recording): The misinformation virus by Elitsa Dermendzhiyska in Aeon.
One can’t scan social media or consume content from certain media outlets and not be deluged with misinformation. The big elephant in the room right now of course is the fallout from the big lie that Biden did not win the November 2020 election. He did. It’s not disputable. It’s a fact. (See yesterday’s post by the remarkable Heather Cox Richardson for another vehement dispelling of the big lie.)
Yet, the former guy’s lie and the lying of his enablers continues to taint the electorate with that misinformation. Disinformation is perhaps more accurate since the big lie was a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people and obscure the truth. Sadly, that disinformation worked far too well as evidenced by the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
But the big lie is but one of countless lies we are told by those who wish to deceive us or for whom the lie has become their twisted version of the truth. We are awash in lies, misinformation, and disinformation. The fake news crowd is running amok and it’s up to each one of us who cares about the truth to stand up and not tolerate those lies and subterfuge.
As the article points out, fake news has been around before the invention of the printing press. But now technology is the pathway for the virus of misinformation to spew forth and rapidly spread.
What’s different today is the speed, scope and scale of misinformation, enabled by technology. Online media has given voice to previously marginalised groups, including peddlers of untruth, and has supercharged the tools of deception at their disposal. The transmission of falsehoods now spans a viral cycle in which AI, professional trolls and our own content-sharing activities help to proliferate and amplify misleading claims. These new developments have come on the heels of rising inequality, falling civic engagement and fraying social cohesion – trends that render us more susceptible to demagoguery. Just as alarming, a growing body of research over the past decade is casting doubt on our ability – even our willingness – to resist misinformation in the face of corrective evidence.
False information if given life and intentionally spread can take hold in even the best educated people. Research continues to validate that we are all prone to accepting misinformation as truth far more often than we might care to admit. To use modern marketing parlance, misinformation is sticky. Once it’s embedded, it’s difficult to dislodge.
…Yet no matter how clear the correction, typically more than half of subjects’ references to the original misinformation persist. What’s remarkable is that people appear to cling to the falsehood while knowing it to be false. This suggests that, even if successfully debunked, myths can still creep into our judgments and colour our decisions – an outcome referred to in the literature as ‘the continued influence effect’.
Why do we so easily accept falsehoods, and why are they so difficult to replace with the truth. The article points to several hypotheses based on studies.
One of the most common explanations for the continued influence effect puts it down to a gap in our mental model, or the story we tell ourselves about what happened. If the myth fits the ‘logic’ of events, its retraction leaves a hole, and the cogs of the story no longer click into place…
After explaining how intransigent misinformation can be, Dermendzhiyska points out some of the worst misinformation pitfalls. How often misinformation is repeated can affect how quickly it cements into a commonly held belief. Even when a myth is corrected and someone accepts that correction as fact, the original information takes hold again within as little as a week’s time. Age is a factor. Memory sometimes declines with age so older people might be more vulnerable to misinformation.
So, what can be done to stop the spread of misinformation. There are scientifically backed methods to help debunk misinformation when we encounter it.
In recent years, as misinformation has wormed its way into large swathes of society, scientists have been looking for the most effective methods to counter it. Recently, Lewandowsky spearheaded The Debunking Handbook 2020, an online collection of best practice by 22 of the most active researchers in the field. The contributors nominated more than 50 relevant findings and more than 30 practical recommendations, rating them on their importance and the strength of the available evidence. To successfully debunk a myth, the authors conclude, it helps to provide an alternative causal explanation to fill the mental gap that retracting the myth could leave. Counterarguments work too, as they point out the inconsistencies contained in the myth, allowing people to resolve the clash between the true and the false statement. Another strategy is to evoke suspicion about the source of the misinformation. For example, you might be more critical of government officials who reject human-caused global warming if you suspect vested business interests behind the denialist claims.
The Debunking Handbook 2020 document Dermendzhiyska mentions is superb. With only 15 pages of reading you can be armed with a better skill set to counter misinformation. We can change people’s minds. It’s not easy. However, to not attempt to debunk misinformation would leave our society in terrible peril. Truth must reign supreme. Lies and misinformation must be ferreted out and quashed when possible. The Handbook offers several specific strategies to help you replace the lies with the truth. Encouraging media literary is one solid step you can undertake to help rid the world of easily spread lies.
Simply encouraging people to critically evaluate information as they read it can reduce the likelihood of taking in inaccurate information or help people become more discerning in their sharing behavior.
Educating readers about specific strategies to aid in this critical evaluation can help people develop important habits. Such strategies include: Taking a “buyer beware” stance towards all information on social media; slowing down and thinking about the information provided, evaluating its plausibility in light of alternatives; always considering information sources, including their track record, their expertise, and their motives; and verifying claims (e.g., through “lateral reading”) before sharing them. Lateral reading means to check other sources to evaluate the credibility of a website rather than trying to analyse the site itself. Many tools and suggestions for enhancing digital literacy exist.
You cannot assume that people spontaneously engage in such behaviours. People do not routinely track, evaluate, or use the credibility of sources in their judgments. However, when they do, the impact of misinformation from less-credible sources can be reduced…
I strongly recommend reading the entire Handbook. Bookmark it. Share it with your family and friends. If you are part of a group that discusses hot topics, on social media or in real time, share the Handbook with them. The more people who have the tools to debunk misinformation, the better our society and the world.
Even when one can change a person’s mind, does that necessarily translate into that now better-informed person changing their behaviors? Research unfortunately doesn’t give us hope that it always does.
Suppose the perfect message does find a person in need of disabusing, and even succeeds in fixing their false beliefs: will that person’s attitudes and behaviour change accordingly? If you tell people that 97 per cent of climate scientists agree about the reality of global warming, studies show that you’ll likely increase their perception of expert consensus on the subject. But whether this greater awareness translates into action – say, support for carbon-reduction policies – remains unclear. The evidence is mixed, and the question has sparked ‘substantial debate and disagreement’ among researchers, says James Druckman, professor of political science at Northwestern University in Illinois. Yet even in studies that do find a knock-on effect on intentions, that effect is small. In other words, you can deliver the facts to people, you can even get them to accept those facts – and it still might not change a thing.
This debunking stuff is hard work. And it’s not just the uneducated who fall prey to misinformation. Well educated and otherwise thoughtful people absorb misinformation, and it sticks. It sticks for many reasons. One is that when presented with the truth about a lie, that truth can find resistance from a person’s values and identity. Many pervasive falsehoods when debunked can challenge a person to rethink their definition of self, their identity.
Think of the heavily entrenched political partisan who when presented with an array of correction sources still so strongly identifies with a party or movement that the truth is shoved aside and ignored. Think of the corporate CEO who runs a massive enterprise in an industry that pollutes and destroys the environment or adds to climate change. Tell them the truth about causes of climate change and environmental damage and their livelihood and perhaps their identity is threatened. They are so attached to their work that they will engage in any mental gymnastics necessary to align their beliefs and actions with the misinformation that allows them to continue unabated. Confirmation bias is a factor in so much of what we believe and act upon whether we realize it or not.
Kahan argues that rather than being a simple matter of intelligence or critical thinking, the question of global warming triggers deeply held personal beliefs. In a way, asking for people’s take on climate change is also to ask them who they are and what they value. For conservatives to accept the risk of global warming means to also accept the need for drastic cuts to carbon emissions – an idea utterly at odds with the hierarchical, individualistic values at the core of their identity, which, by rejecting climate change, they seek to protect. Kahan found similar polarisation over social issues that impinge on identity, such as gun control, nuclear energy and fracking, but not over more identity-neutral subjects such as GMO foods and artificial sweeteners. In cases where identity-protective motivations play a key role, people tend to seek and process information in biased ways that conform to their prior beliefs. They might pay attention only to sources they agree with and ignore divergent views. Or they might believe congruent claims without a moment’s thought, but spare no effort finding holes in incongruent statements: the brightest climate-change deniers were simply better than their peers at counter-arguing evidence they didn’t like.
This hints at a vexing conclusion: that the most knowledgeable among us can be more, not less, susceptible to misinformation if it feeds into cherished beliefs and identities. And though most available research points to a conservative bias, liberals are by no means immune.
That’s sort of depressing, isn’t it? We want to believe intelligent people can resist misinformation, or at the least readily accept the truth when presented. But reality it what it is. We must continually remain vigilant in the pursuit of truth and debunking misinformation wherever it is encountered.
After enduring a four-year political and social hellscape when former guy was in office, we now know that even our stalwart democracy can fall victim to the populism that has plagued other countries.
The term ‘post-truth’ became the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2016, and came to characterise that year’s US presidential election and the Brexit referendum. In a 2017 paper, Lewandowsky argued that we’ve gone ‘beyond misinformation’: ‘The post-truth problem is not a blemish on the mirror,’ he wrote. ‘The problem is that the mirror is a window into an alternative reality.’ In this other reality, marked by the global rise of populism, lies have morphed into an expression of identity, a form of group membership. In the US, the UK, Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland, Brazil and India, populists have captured a growing disenchantment with the status quo by pitting ‘the people’ against ‘the elites’, and attacking so-called elitist values – education, evidence, expertise.
In the populist story, lying takes on the trappings of anti-establishmentarianism, undermining truth as a social norm. This is the misinformation virus at its most diabolical: a point where health (in this case, of the body politic) ceases to matter – as was so graphically demonstrated during the storming of the US Capitol this January – and the host consents to being infected. (The one good thing to come out of that ‘insurrection’ is that tough action was swiftly taken against the peddlers of misinformation with Twitter banning the then president Donald Trump and suspending thousands of QAnon-related accounts.)
I know all of this isn’t fun to learn or accept. My readers and social networks tend to be comprised of intelligent people who try to embrace critical thinking. But the arrogance I and many feel, believing we are not susceptible to misinformation, is dangerous. I am. You are. Everyone has likely sworn allegiance to some misinformation that we later learn was entirely off base and misguided. So goes the world. We must remain on guard for untruths and correct them when we can. Correct them for ourselves. Correct them for those with whom we socialize or work even though they might sometimes hold the misinformation as sacred.
After reading the article I am even more dedicated to ensuring that I do not succumb to misinformation, and if I do I hope I have the humbleness and tenacity to accept that I believed a lie and correct myself. When possible, I try to spread truths to replace the misinformation in whatever strategic manner might be most effective at the time. Sometimes I’m successful. Sometimes I’m not. I have to try.
Since so much of misinformation lately is formed and proliferated online, Adi Robertson wrote a useful article on how to address online misinformation, How to fight lies, tricks, and chaos online. Do an online search and you’ll find many similar articles.
I encourage you to read the entire article upon which this post is founded and then the Debunking Handbook 2020. If you have the energy to read additional advice elsewhere, great. But if you read just those two things and commit to practicing vigilant debunking of misinformation in the most strategically effective ways possible, you’ll go a long way toward making your social circle, your community, your country, and the world better places for us all.
As Gore Vidal once said, “At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.” Vidal was correct in his assessment. It’s up to all of us to commit to correcting untruths and to do so for the entirety of our lives.
Misinformation is here to stay. So must be our resolve to counter it.