Facts won't fix this: experts on how to fight
America's disinformation crisis
‘What does it look like if we don’t have a shared
sense of reality?’
Illustration: Nico Krijno/The Guardian
Trump’s false claims about the election and
coronavirus are taking a dangerous toll. Can the divide be healed?
Lois
Beckett
@loisbeckett
Fri 1 Jan
2021 06.00 GMT
At the
beginning of 2021, millions of Americans appear to disagree about one of the
most basic facts of their democracy: that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential
election.
The
consequences of Donald Trump’s repeated, baseless claims of voter fraud will
come in several waves, researchers who study disinformation say, even if Trump
ultimately hands over power and leaves the White House. And there is no quick
or easy way to fix this crisis, they warn. Because when it comes to dealing
with disinformation, simply repeating the facts doesn’t do much to change
anyone’s mind.
In the
short term, Trump’s false claims about election fraud have weakened Biden’s
ability to address the coronavirus pandemic. “If only 20% of the population is
like, ‘You’re not my president, I’m going to double down on my mask
resistance,’ or ‘I’m going to continue to have parties over the holidays,’ that
means we are going to be even less likely to bring this thing under control,”
said Whitney Phillips, a professor of communications at Syracuse University.
Over the
longer term, the president’s falsehoods may also undermine Biden’s overall
governing capability, just as the racist “birther” conspiracy theory, another
false claim spread by Trump, helped fuel political resistance to Barack Obama’s
presidency. And the damage to Americans’ basic trust in their democracy may
have effects far beyond electoral politics.
“What does
it look like if we don’t have a shared sense of reality?” said Claire Wardle,
the executive director of First Draft, a group that researches and combats
disinformation. “We’ve seen more conspiracy theories moving mainstream. There’s
an increasing number of people who do not believe in the critical
infrastructure of a society. Where does that end?”
How we got
here
America’s
current disinformation crisis is the culmination of more than two decades of
pollution of the country’s information ecosystem, Wardle said. The spread of
disinformation on social media is one part of that story, but so is the rise of
alternative rightwing media outlets, the lack of investment in public media,
the demise of local news outlets, and the replacement of shuttered local
newspapers with hyper-partisan online outlets.
This
“serious fragmentation” of the American media ecosystem presents a stark
contrast with, say, the UK, where during some weeks of the pandemic, 94% of the
UK adult population, including 86% of younger people, tuned into the BBC, a
publicly funded broadcaster, according to official statistics.
And the
left and right in the US don’t merely have different sets of media outlets for
their different audiences: they have also developed distinct models of
information-sharing, Wardle said. Mainstream media outlets still follow a
traditional top-down broadcast model: an authoritative source produces the news
and sends it out to consumers. The rightwing media ecosystem, which developed
through talk radio, on the other hand, operates as a network of media
personalities interacting with each other, “a community telling stories to
their own community”, Wardle said.
Trump has
built on that, embracing what Kate Starbird, a University of Washington
professor who studies disinformation, on Twitter called a model of
“participatory disinformation”.
“Trump
didn’t just prime his audience to be receptive to false narratives of voter
fraud, he inspired them to create them … and then echoed those false claims
back at them,” she wrote.
Participatory
disinformation might actually be “stickier” and more effective than “top-down
propaganda”, Starbird argued, in part because of the “positive reinforcement”
of Trump supporters seeing their “‘discoveries’ repeated by their media &
political celebrities”.
When their
platforms turned out to be ideal environments for making and monetizing
participatory disinformation, social media companies were slow to curb its
spread.
Companies
like Twitter and Facebook did not begin putting warning labels on Trump’s false
voting fraud claims until very close to the election. Even then, only a handful
of his tweets were flagged, Wardle noted, while Trump sent dozens of other
tweets pushing the same story and media outlets continued to report on his
statements, creating a powerful national narrative about fraud despite the
attempts at factchecking.
The social
media platforms’ decision to finally flag some of Trump’s disinformation right
before a consequential election also may have had its own damaging political
consequences. “They spent so much time refusing to moderate content that what
they’re doing now feels like the worst kind of censorship,” Joan Donovan, the
research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public
Policy, said. “If they had been doing that for years, it wouldn’t be so
shocking.”
A new
approach?
The rapid
spread of Trump’s election lies should be a “wake-up call” for the
“well-intentioned people” who think that disinformation can be cured by
providing “more quality information”, such as encouraging people to eat “more
spinach instead of chocolate”, Wardle, who has conducted training sessions for
journalists on how to understand and deal with disinformation, said.
“We have an
emotional relationship to information. It is not rational,” Wardle said. But
people who work in the “quality information space”, Wardle’s term for
journalists, scientists, researchers and factcheckers, still often act as if
information-processing were fundamentally rational, rather than deeply tied to
feelings and the way a person expresses their identity.
It’s
crucial to understand that the way people process information is through entire
narratives, not individual facts, Wardle said. Trying to combat disinformation
through factchecking or debunking individual false claims just turns into an
endless, fruitless game of “whack-a-mole”.
Take the
New York Times’ banner headline a week after the election: “Election Officials
Nationwide Find No Fraud”. The story cited election officials from both
political parties in dozens of states.
But that
reporting, though valuable, wasn’t likely to change many minds, Phillips, the
communications professor, said.
“There is
an enormous percentage of the population who sees the word ‘election official’
and actually, in their brains, decodes that as liberal, anti-Trump,” she said.
“If you’re disinclined to trust institutions, who cares what election officials
are saying, because they’re corrupt, they’re in bed with Biden and the fake
news media.
“The
impulse to throw facts at these problems is really strong, and it’s
understandable,” she said “But simply saying what the facts are is not going to
convince minds that aren’t already open.”
Conspiracy
theorists, in particular, tend not to be very open to falsification of their
claims, added Deen Freelon, an associate professor at the University of North
Carolina Chapel Hill who studies social media and politics. “Almost any new
piece of evidence or fact can be converted to the conspiracy theory
perspective.”
Research
has also shown that disinformation and conspiracy theories are often deeply
intertwined with racial prejudice and hatred, he added. Some of this year’s
most dangerous disinformation, about the seriousness of coronavirus pandemic,
which disproportionately killed black Americans, and about Trump supposedly
winning the election, based on the argument that votes in majority-black cities
were fraudulent and should not be counted, were clearly influenced by white
Americans’ racial views, he noted.
It’s no
accident, Freelon said, that some of the same people suggesting Covid is a myth
are also arguing that black votes are illegitimate.
‘A lot of
the country’s been taken’
While it is
possible to engage with people who believe deeply in false narratives, and
sometimes change their minds, that work is most successful on an individual
basis, with people who know each other well, experts said.
It’s
helpful to understand someone’s fundamental framework for viewing the world,
including whom they view as the “good guys” and the “bad guys”, in order to
understand what kind of additional information might sway them, Phillips said.
“The other
thing that makes people move on this – it’s corny – is love,” Freelon added.
“People who love you, your family, people who are willing to engage.”
But
disinformation is also sustained by personal relationships.
“Nearly all
conspiracy theories are supported by social connections and ties. It’s not just
one person subscribing to this in isolation, but a network of people who
support each other in their beliefs,” Freelon said. “Leaving the group means at
a minimum betraying those friends and cutting those social ties.”
There are
other emotional barriers to people changing their minds.
“Nobody
anywhere likes to feel like they’ve been duped,” said Shafiqah Hudson, an
author and researcher who has studied online disinformation campaigns. “We will
fight tooth and nail as humans to avoid feeling foolish. That’s why you see
people double down. Nobody wants to feel like they’ve been taken, but a lot of
the country’s really been taken.”
While
personal relationships can help to combat disinformation, many Americans have
simply given up trying to fight relatives’ false beliefs.
During the
holidays in the US, “people are muting their uncles [on social media] or
refusing to talk to their mom,” Wardle said.
“I am
worried,” she said. “If you have two different senses of reality, with two
different sets of actors who don’t trust the other side, who are not open to
listening to the other side, that’s not how democracy functions.”
This
article was amended on 1 January 2021 to remove a reference to the BBC being
“taxpayer-funded”.
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