The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread

by Cailin O'Connor

Whatever one thinks about the merits of Trump’s election, or of the UK’s exit from the EU (“Brexit”), it is profoundly troubling to think that these momentous political events were underwritten by falsehoods. And it raises a deep and unsettling question: Can democracy survive in an age of fake news?

If you believe false things about the world, and you make decisions on the basis of those beliefs, then those decisions are unlikely to yield the outcomes you expect and desire. The world pushes back. If you do not believe that large ocean fish contain much mercury, or do not believe that mercury is harmful, then you may eat sushi while pregnant—and perhaps increase the chance of fetal mercury poisoning.

Many of our beliefs—perhaps most of them—have a more complex origin: we form them on the basis of what other people tell us. We trust and learn from one another. Is there mercury in large fish after all? Most of us haven’t the slightest idea how to test mercury levels.

Political propaganda, however, is just part of the problem. Often more dangerous—because we are less attuned to it—is industrial propaganda. This runs the gamut from advertising, which is explicitly intended to influence beliefs, to concerted misinformation campaigns designed to undermine reliable evidence. A classic example of the latter is the campaign by tobacco companies during the second half of the twentieth century to disrupt and undermine research demonstrating the link between smoking and lung cancer.

Evidence-poor arguments about public-health issues such as global climate change, vaccination, and genetically modified foods are not only widely discussed and credited in mainstream political discussions, but in many cases they are actively supported by members of the current US administration, members of Congress, and some leading politicians in the UK, EU, and elsewhere.

the effects of propaganda can occur even in the absence of a propagandist. If journalists make efforts to be “fair” by presenting results from two sides of a scientific debate, they can bias what results the public sees in deeply misleading ways.

Increasingly in the West—including both the United States and much of Europe—decisions are being made on the basis of lies and falsehoods. While it might seem that the solution is more information, this view is too limited. We have more information than ever before. Arguably, it is the abundance of information, shared in novel social contexts, that underlies the problems we face.

Things are about to get worse, however. So far, we have assumed that all of the scientists in our models share real results, and that they are all motivated by the goal of establishing truth. But the history of science—and politics—reveals that this is often a bad assumption. There are powerful forces in the world whose interests depend on public opinion and who manipulate the social mechanisms we have just described to further their own agendas.

course, smoking does cause lung cancer—and also cancers of the mouth and throat, heart disease, emphysema, and dozens of other serious illnesses. It would be impossible, using any legitimate scientific method, to generate a robust and convincing body of evidence demonstrating that smoking is safe. But that was not the goal. The goal was rather to create the appearance of uncertainty: to find, fund, and promote research that muddied the waters, made the existing evidence seems less definitive, and gave policy makers and tobacco users just enough cover to ignore the scientific consensus. As a tobacco company executive put it in an unsigned memo fifteen years later: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the public.”

Pew survey of 1,002 adults found that 23 percent admitted to having shared fake news—of whom 73 percent admitted that they did so unwittingly, discovering only later that the news was fake.22 (The others claimed to have known that it was fake at the time but shared it anyway.) Of course, these results do not include participants who unwittingly shared fake news and never learned that it was fake, nor do they include those who would not admit to having been duped.

Journalism has legal and ethical frameworks that seek to promote “fairness” by representing all sides of a debate. From 1949 until 1987 the US Federal Communications Commission even maintained a policy called the Fairness Doctrine that required media with broadcast licenses to offer contrasting views on controversial topics of public interest. The rule no longer applies—and even if it did, few people get their news from broadcast media any longer. But since few journalists relish being accused of bias, pressures remain for journalists to present both sides of disagreements (or at least appear to).

Fairness sounds great in principle, but it is extremely disruptive to the public communication of complex issues. Consider again the model of a journalist selectively communicating results. Now, instead of the journalist sharing only surprising results, suppose that every time she chooses to share a result supporting one view, she also shares one supporting the other view—by searching through the history of recent results to find one that reflects the “other perspective.”

Sharing equal proportions of results going in both directions puts a strong finger on the scale in the wrong direction. Indeed, norms of fairness have long been recognized as a tool for propagandists: the tobacco industry, for instance, often invoked the Fairness Doctrine to insist that its views be represented on television and in newspaper articles.

it most certainly is journalists’ job to investigate and question those purported matters of fact on which major domestic and foreign policies are based—including determining whether there is a scientific consensus on an issue relevant to policy-making.

the mere existence of contrarians or (apparent) controversy is not itself a story, nor does it justify equal time for all parties to a disagreement. And the publication of a surprising or contrary-to-expectation research article is not in and of itself newsworthy.

So we need journalists to avoid sensationalizing new findings and to report both that there is a consensus (when there is one) and the reasons for it. It is particularly important for journalists and politicians to carefully vet the sources of their information. It will invariably be the case that nonexperts need experts to aggregate evidence for them. This is what propagandists seek to exploit, by standing in for disinterested experts and aggregating evidence in a way favorable to their own interests. Often the groups doing this aggregation consciously attempt to mislead journalists about their independence and credentials.

Journalists reporting on science need to rely not on individual scientists (even when they are well-credentialed or respected), but on the consensus views of established, independent organizations, such as the National Academy of Sciences, and on internat...

Reports from the United Nations, particularly when they involve serious peer review, as with the IPCC, are also often more reliable than those from the governments of individual nations. Such institutions can certainly be manipulated for partisan ends,29 but they are far more likely to be reliable than individuals or organizations whose interests are tied to the issues at stake.

In an era of global warming, websites like Breitbart News and Infowars are more damaging to public health than Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man were in the past, and they should be treated as such.

If principles of free speech are compatible with laws against defamatory lies about individuals, surely they are also compatible with regulating damaging lies dressed up as reported fact on matters of public consequence. Lying media should be clearly labeled as such, for the same reason that we provide the number of calories on a package of Doritos or point out health effects on a cigarette box.