After a spasm of concern about the role of misinformation in fuelling racist riots in England, don’t expect things to calm down: the US election is approaching, and with it a crescendo of anxiety about online lies.
The received wisdom now seems to be that misinformation — or perhaps Russian disinformation — is everywhere, that ordinary citizens are helpless to distinguish truth from lies, and furthermore that they do not want to. This was a narrative that began in 2016, the year in which the UK voted for Brexit after a campaign dominated by a lie on the side of a bus, in which Donald Trump, a serial fabulist, won the US presidency and in which “post-truth” entered the discourse.
But there is a problem with this story of ubiquitous online misinformation. In fact, there are three.
The first is that the story encourages a corrosive cynicism about everything. A world in which everyone is lying to you is a world in which you can pick and choose whatever you want to believe and to reject. If you know the liars are out there, you’ll be careful; if you think the liars are everywhere, you might give up on the idea of truth altogether. (This was a central argument of my 2020 book, How To Make The World Add Up.)
The second problem is that by emphasising the role of misinformation, we risk misunderstanding our political problems and their solutions. For centrist dads like me, it was unsettling to realise that many people were willing to give their votes to Brexit and to Donald Trump. The idea that they didn’t really mean it, but were led astray by deceptive propaganda, was perversely comforting. That idea helped shield us from the unpleasant possibility that people voted for Brexit and for Trump with their eyes wide open.
The idea that misinformation was to blame for everything was a distraction too. For media outlets, narrow fact-checking is an attractive business, easily delivering crisp conclusions. But while fact-checking is important, it can also amplify misinformation when it is clumsily done. Even when elegantly performed, it can pull the spotlight away from the key issues. This was a central story of the Brexit referendum campaign, when disproportionate attention was paid to the issue of how much money the UK really sent to the EU, and not enough attention was paid to the knotty policy questions that emerged only after the voters had spoken.
The third and most important problem with the narrative that misinformation is all around us? It’s not true. A recent article in Nature by Ceren Budak, Brendan Nyhan, David M Rothschild, Emily Thorson and Duncan J Watts argues that the commentariat talks about misinformation in a way that is increasingly divorced from rigorous evidence.
For example: how much misinformation is there, and in front of whose eyes is it being placed? Here, there is a stark contrast between perception and reality. Researchers constructed a list of nearly 500 “untrustworthy” websites operating in 2016, but of all the visits made to news sites by US citizens in 2016, this long list of dubious sources explains less than 6 per cent. Other researchers use different methods but reach similar conclusions: extremist content and deceptive news stories are not negligible, but represent a small slice of what people are watching and reading.
It’s fair to say that 6 per cent is a higher proportion than anyone would want, but the figure is much lower than people seem to fear. A Gallup study in 2018 found that US adults believe 65 per cent of news on social media is misinformation. That suggests to me that we should be less concerned about people falling for fake news stories and more worried that ordinary citizens are cynical about stories that are trustworthy.
Not only does misinformation represent a small fraction of online traffic, it is a small fraction which disproportionately attracts a small minority. A paper published in Science in 2019 by Nir Grinberg, Lisa Friedland and others examined Twitter behaviour during the 2016 election and concluded that “only 1 per cent of individuals accounted for 80 per cent of fake news source exposures . . . individuals most likely to engage with fake news sources were conservative leaning, older, and highly engaged with political news”. In other words, the audience for fake news on Twitter in 2016 was a tiny minority of users, most of whom would have voted for Trump in any case.
None of this is to suggest that misinformation is a trivial problem. If 5 or 10 per cent of social media “news” is wrong, that’s a serious concern. I warned last summer that a classic disinformation tactic is to blame a real heinous crime on an entirely innocent group — exactly the kind of lies that circulated after the murder of children in Southport. Lies that circulate among a small minority can still do a lot of harm, especially if that minority enthusiastically turns to intimidation and violence.
And I remain worried about the possibility of a co-ordinated disinformation attack, which if well-timed and well-aimed could swing a close election, and which demands forethought and defensive measures that liberal democracies have been slow to embrace.
These problems are all real. But they require focused attention, not pearl-clutching about fake news. Most of us only hear about the latest online lies because they are being repeated by political elites, or by mainstream news sources — sometimes in a well-meaning but risky “fact-checking” exercise. When it comes to misinformation, social media companies surely have a case to answer. But they are not the only ones who should be looking in the mirror.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 30 August 2024.
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