Information disorders and democracy
False and misleading information is not a new phenomenon. Unverified rumours and emotion-laden reports based on fear or anxiety have influenced human decision making since the beginning of time. Caroline Jack’s Lexicon of Lies identifies an array of terminology relevant to “problematic information”. Disinformation is the intentional spread of false information. Misinformation is the spread of information that is unintentionally inaccurate (Jack 2017). The Council of Europe’s report on “Information Disorders” goes further to explore social media’s impact on “information pollution”; a metaphor suggesting that junk news is harmful (Wardle and Dcrakhshan 2017). This terminology moves away from the term “fake news”, which is both imprecise and highly politicised.
The case studies in this volume illustrate that social media amplifies information disorders by making it easy for anyone to share false or misleading information, to find others with extremist views and to generate the viral spread of false information because people seem to trust and have confidence in the information that comes from their social network. As detailed in Chapter 1, the design and algorithms of major social media platform seek to spread content and grab attention. These goals geared towards profit inadvertently amplify information disorders. The Greek agora’s “algorithm” or design aimed to improve communication and dialogue. The current design of major social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter lends itself to false and misleading information.
In his book Lie Machines: How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives, Philip Howard details the force of disinformation on social media (Howard 2020). Social media promised the democratisation of information, but some counter that it has resulted instead in the weaponisation of information, making it more difficult for society to have a conversation based on a shared understanding of what is or is not true.
False information on social media platforms spreads faster and farther than on legacy media channels. In April 2018, a group of MIT researchers released a report, based on a data set of false “rumor cascades” on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. Researchers found that false information spread more quickly and to more people on social media than true information (Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral 2018). Researchers hypothesise that false information, exaggerated information and emotionally alarming information spreads more quickly than other news because it triggers the “lizard” brain and gains more views and clicks. In early 2020, the World Health Organization sounded the alarm that widespread disinformation about the origins, severity, prevention and treatment of the Covid-19 pandemic on social media had already created a massive “disinfodemic” (First Draft 2020).
In his book #Republic, Cass Sunstein describes how social media disseminates inaccurate information and emotions, particularly fear and anger, through
“cybercascades” that spread like wildfire through social media platforms (Sun- stein 2017, 98). The design of social media platforms contributes to this problem. Popularity translates to legitimacy as algorithms calculate what messages to show other people in their news feeds. If false information spreads more quickly, algorithms learn to share more false information.
The psychological temptation to spend more time on social media also has consequences for the quality of information people consume. On social media, anyone can publish anything. Real news mixes with deceptive propaganda. People who use social media primarily for entertainment may encounter fake news involuntarily. If they do not seek out other sources, this fake news may be their only encounter with news-related information. Social media platforms do not distinguish the source of information through unique fonts, colours or frames that could alert users to credible news sources. Facebook’s News Feed posts all look the same, regardless of the content, thus mixing our political, personal and commercial activities (Vaidhyanathan 2018).
Anyone can create an account, or multiple accounts, on social media platforms. From 2017-2020, Facebook reported that it disabled approximately 12 billion take accounts (Facebook 2020). On some social media platforms like WhatsApp, an instant messaging app owned by Facebook with over a billion users around the world, people can post a fake news story and circulate it within a group without any public exposure. This means that the rest of the public may never know that a take news story has spread. This, in turn, makes it more difficult for fact-checkers or professional news media to counter the false information.
Social media companies often say that they cannot reliably check for conspiracies, lies and take users. Faced with criticisms that they censor too many posts on one hand and allow too much hateful and violent content on the other, social media companies are struggling to manage processes for removing misinformation and disinformation. WhatsApp asserted that it cannot monitor messaging on this app, although some assert that it could remove such content if it wanted to (Gupta and Taneja 2018). And Facebook only decided in October 2020 to remove Holocaust denial and other false information, even though civil society has been raising alarms about the relationship between disinformation and violent extremism for many years (Frankel 2020).
