Anti-Intellectualism and The War Against Science in America

Conspiracy theories, disinformation, and false information have been increasing in America in recent times, resulting in growing anti-intellectualism and the weakening of democracy.

Richard Hofstadter’s?Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics?are two essential works that expose the troubling trends of irrationalism, demagoguery, destructive populism, and conspiratorial thinking that have long influenced American politics and culture.

Anti-expert, anti-science during COVID

Major media coverage in mainstream media (particularly FOX News) in which politicians (mostly Republican) and articles and videos on social media challenge the conclusions and perspectives of scientific experts on issues related to COVID-19. These challenges often come from commentators without scientific expertise providing no evidence for their claims or presenting false evidence. Additionally, these commentators or networks frequently create an argumentative equivalency suggesting that uninformed opinions hold the same weight as expert views supported by scientific evidence. They may assert that there are “two sides” to an issue, even though one side is clearly false or lacks factual support.

In an article by Edric Huang and colleagues, they describe in detail the origins of anti-intellectualism in America and warn of its consequences. They say about former President Trump’s response to COVID, “The very real consequences of anti-intellectualism used as a tool to politically posture are particularly evident with the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Trump has expressed his disdain for ‘experts’ since 2016; once COVID-19 became a national crisis in the U.S., Trump and his top policymakers waged an ongoing campaign to vilify Anthony Fauci, considered the nation's top COVID-19 expert and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. As Trump and his policymakers dismissed both the reality and severity of the virus, Fauci received death threats and became the target of an online conspiracy theory. The alignment of COVID-19 cautiousness with a violation of freedom and the embracing of liberal identity has led many to ignore the public health measures set to contain the disease, including wearing a mask, social distancing, and minimising large group interactions.

?The Biden administration has made significant efforts to re-establish public trust in experts and a belief in science, but the current situation in which large numbers of the public are refusing to get vaccinated against COVID, and the demonstrations (some of which are violent) against reasonable public health measures such as masking and social distancing, reflects a deep distrust of scientific experts.

Americans’ Attitudes Toward Experts and Science

American antipathy toward experts and science can be seen as a part of a bigger phenomenon of anti-intellectualism, which has a strong tradition in the United States

Anti-intellectualism can be defined as “the generalized distrust of experts and intellectuals” according to Eric Merkley, writing in the journal Public Opinion Quarterly. He says “This mistrust can have a number of different sources, but foremost among them is populism. Some populists see experts as a class of elites who exercise power over virtuous ordinary citizens, and historically there is some link between populism and anti-intellectualism, at least in the United States.”

There has been a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in America, unlike most other Western countries says Richard Hofstadter, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his book, Anti-Intellectualism In American Life, He says that anti-intellectualism “ is explained as “a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life”.

Hofstadter traces the roots of anti-intellectualism to the evangelical Protestantism of America’s first European settlers and later its influence on the “American Dream,' the belief that an ordinary man, even without an education, can become rich and successful. Since the eighteenth century, as evangelicalism emerged in contrast to the Catholic Church and Church of England, anti-education rhetoric became a common response in institutionalised evangelical settings. ‘I do not read any book,’ said influential evangelist preacher Dwight Moody, ‘unless it will help me to understand [the Bible].'

Over the course of the next 200 years in America Evangelical Protestantism supported anti-intellectualism and anti-science. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that nearly a quarter of Americans belong to white evangelical churches and 42% of Americans are creationists who rejected scientific facts about the origins of the earth and humanity.

?America’s “Founding Fathers,” such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington espoused masculine ideals of the “self-made” uneducated man: a type of rugged entrepreneur who came to America with nothing, but through hard work, tenacity, and a little luck, could become a successful and wealthy. He did not need an education to succeed," according to Emily Casanova, writing in Science Over A Cuppa In contrast, enlightened intellectuals were characterized as effeminate and ineffectual.

?Hofstadter mentions Thomas Jefferson’s election as President as a clear example: Federalist leaders and the clergy mocked his intellect as one that “might entitle him to the Professorship of a college,” but also as utterly incompatible with presidential and military duties. “To be intellectual in colonial meant to evangelicals meant to lack faith and by extension morals and conviction — all of which they deemed religion and successful businesses to be built upon,” Hofstadter says.

?Taylorism, named after efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor based on his book The Principles of Scientific Management ?reinforced a hard distinction between intellect and practical business from the 1890s through to the 1930s. Taylor’s aim was to improve economic efficiency and labor productivity. To do so he separated general workers (doers) from those who were deemed to have potential to become managers (thinkers). Taylor said in his influential book ?“one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron [a worker] is that he shall be so stupid and phlegmatic that he...resembles in his mental make-up the ox.”

?The divide between public views of intellect and “common sense” continued for the next hundred years, and by the 1960s had evolved into a culture war between liberals and the first wave of neoconservatism . Irving Kristol , one of the first thinkers and champions of neoconservatism in the modern era argued anti-intellectualism was “a reaction against the Left's nihilistic revolt against conventional morality and religion”. He and other neoconservatives saw movements such as the Women’s Liberation, Civil Rights, and anti-war movements as antithetical to American patriotism — a belief that many conservatives hold today. According to Wendy Brown, writing in the journal Political Theory neoconservatives rallied behind the state as “setting the moral-religious compass for society, and indeed for the world .”

“But I think that the backlash against experts that we see today is different,” says Matt Motta, writing in the journal American Politics Research : ?“what I think we see going on now, is an attack on experts as individuals, as people – demonizing those experts who disagree with our ideological viewpoints, and denigrating their professionalism.”

Motta goes on to say: “Yet, while anti-intellectualism may seem like it has been a unique feature of Donald Trump’s rhetoric in the 2016 campaign, recent research suggests that anti-intellectual attitude endorsement has been growing in the mass public for decades, especially on the ideological right.” Other research has shown that “that conservatives have become more anti-intellectual over time and that polarization has continued since 1974.”

American’s antipathy toward educated “elites” some experts believe, is part of a tradition of independence and individualism that many believe has made the country “exceptional.” It echoes in the phrases such as “history is bunk” and that old-fashioned common sense is all you need to make decisions.

Increasing political polarization in America has transformed a general distrust of experts and science into many conspiracy theories. Opponents of both vaccines and climate change question the integrity and professionalism of researchers, suggesting they provide the findings for money.

H. Sidkey, writing in the Skeptical Inquirer, argues “A scientifically literate public seems to lack the necessary skills to distinguish between contending claims to knowledge or differentiate between fact and opinion. We live in a scary and confusing ‘post-truth’ era of disinformation, ‘fake news’ ‘counter-knowledge,’ ‘weaponized lies, ‘conspiracy theories and irrationalism.” He goes on to say “Bogus and irrational ideas are thriving and seem to be widely received and accepted.”

Mark Bauerlein, in his book,?The Dumbest Generation , describes, as he sees it, “ how a whole generation of youth is being dumbed down by their aversion to reading anything of substance and their addiction to what he calls digital ‘crap’? on social media.”

Anti-intellectualism is commonly expressed as the deprecation of education and philosophy, and the dismissal of art, literature and science as impractical and a waste of time and energy. Anti-intellectuals see themselves as ?“champions of the common folk”—populists against political and academic elitism—and tend to see educated people as a status class and feel that intellectuals dominate political discourse and control higher education, says Motta.

Susan Jacoby argues in an article in the Spokesman Review that “it is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an ‘elitist,’ one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office.” Instead, she says, “our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just ‘folks,’ a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980.”

Jacoby argues it is “not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge.”??Jacoby calls this anti-rationalism — a syndrome that is “particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.”

Journalist Charles Pierce, author of?Idiot America , says this of anti-intellectualism in America: “The rise of idiot America today represents–for profit mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power–the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they are talking about. In the new media age, everybody is an expert.”

Tom Nichols is professor at the U.S. Naval War College and author of?The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters,? argues “In the far less grand homes of ordinary American families, knowledge of every kind is also under attack. Parents argue with their child’s doctor over the safety of vaccines. Famous athletes speculate that the world might actually be flat. College administrators ponder dropping algebra from the curriculum because students keep failing it. This is all immensely dangerous, not only to the well-being of individual citizens, but to the survival of the United States as a republic.”

Nicols goes on to say “A significant number of laypeople now believe, for no reason but self-affirmation, that they know better than experts in almost every field. They have come to this conclusion after being coddled in classrooms from kindergarten through college, continually assured by infotainment personalities in increasingly segmented media that popular views, no matter how nutty, are virtuous and right, and mesmerized by an internet that tells them exactly what they want to hear, no matter how ridiculous the question.”

The theme that anybody’s opinion is as good as anybody else’s opinion (regardless of their expertise) runs deep in the American fabric.

Jonathan Chait, writing in The New Yorker has traced some of the origins of current anti-expert, anti-science and anti-intellectualism in today’s American society. He says, “In 1973, Republicans trusted science more than religion, while Democrats trusted religion more than science. The reverse now holds true. In the meantime, working-class whites left the Democratic Party, which has increasingly taken on the outlook of the professional class with its trust in institutions and empiricism. The influx of working-class whites (especially religiously observant ones) has pushed Republicans toward increasingly paranoid varieties of populism.”

?Chait goes on to say “The George W. Bush era was punctuated by clashes between scientists and social conservatives, who resisted approval of an HPV vaccine to protect against sexually transmitted diseases, any sex education other than abstinence counselling, and federally funded research on stem cells. These came atop the now-customary complaints that the administration was turning environmental regulation over to energy lobbyists and ignoring warnings from scientists.”?

?One consequence?of the triumph of anti-science thinking was the “creation of an opening for snake-oil peddlers and quacks,” Chait says.? According to Chait, author Rick Perlstein has recounted signing up for conservative publications and then beginning to receive email pitches for products like the “23-Cent Heart Miracle,” which “Washington, the medical industry, and drug companies?refuse?to tell you about.” Deceased Presidential candidate Herman Cain had used his platform to promote “The 4 Sneaky Hormones That Are Making You Fat and How to Stop Them Now” and cures for erectile dysfunction.

?Conservative personalities like Mike Huckabee and Alex Jones have all sold bogus medical treatments to their supporters, who are ready to believe them over scientific experts. Many Americans no longer trust mainstream sources of knowledge and the scientists who produce them from research. ?

?When the coronavirus?hit the U.S., conservatives and populists did not turn to reputable scientists to give guidance, they (including many politicians from the leaders down in the Republican Party) turned to a small number of scientists espousing debunked medical information (e.g.: hydroquinone) or amateurs pundits with no knowledge or expertise in epidemiology who were concocting pseudoscientific rationales to allow conservatives to disregard legitimate scientific conclusions.

?Chait says Trump and his allies were supplied with lies and disreputable information from the science-skeptic wing of the conservative-think-tank world: “Steven Milloy, a climate-science skeptic who runs a think tank funded by tobacco and oil companies and who served on Trump’s environmental transition team,?dismissed the virus as less deadly than the flu .” Libertarian philosopher Richard Epstein, who had once insisted, “The evidence in favor of the close linkage between carbon dioxide and global warming has not been clearly established,” turned his analytical powers to projected pandemic death tolls. He estimated just 500 American deaths, an analysis that was circulated within the Trump White House before Epstein issued a correction, Chait writes.

The Influence of the Internet and Social Media

?The internet has completely changed the way that individuals seek out and find information about almost any issue or problem. ?Before the Internet, people relied on encyclopedias, and experts to obtain information.

Today, with computers and smartphones that can search using Google, anyone can always have the answer to any question with them, whether that answer is factual or not. This makes many feel like experts themselves, or believe whatever they read without verifying the source or its integrity. Our ability to quickly find an answer has led us skip slow and methodical time for ease of access to answers. Infotainment that offers easy answers is preferred over engaging with expert nuance. Studies have also highlighted the significant impact of confirmation bias, as people tend to seek out information that aligns with their beliefs and ignore alternative perspectives.

We can add to this trend the change in focus of mainstream news. At one time in the past, news programs had in-depth reporting on complex issues with invited experts in various scientific fields being interviewed to explain the issues. This also required the journalists and broadcasters themselves to be intelligent, educated and knowledgeable in order to conduct a good interview. Now we see many news broadcasts at the national level (particularly FOX News) where the focus is on interviewing people with no knowledge of an issue, but espoused “self-appointed” expertise, and broadcasters and journalists chosen for their physical attractiveness. In effect, mainstream news has become “infotainment” where there is no distinction between fact and opinion. The result, combined with the 24-hour news cycle, is the widening spectrum of infotainment,

Tom Nichols argues that “fusing of entertainment, news, punditry, and citizen participation is a chaotic mess that does not inform people so much as it creates the illusion of being informed.” Because we can choose our infotainment, we self-select which news we consume and which sources we choose to trust or distrust without having the personal responsibility to ensure its veracity.

The public seems to lack the necessary skills to distinguish between contending claims to knowledge or differentiate between fact and opinion. We now live in the “post-truth” era of disinformation, “fake news,” “counter knowledge,” “weaponized lies,” and conspiracy theories.

Today, crazy irrational ideas are thriving and can easily find a willing audience to believe them. However, tolerating irrationalism and scientific illiteracy poses many dangers. Numerous people have died because of their trust in sham alternative medical cures, and many others have lost their life savings by believing in psychics and miracle workers As philosophers Theodor Schick and Lewis Vaughn explain in their book, How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age :?“A democratic society depends on the ability of its members to make rational choices. However rational choices must be based on rational beliefs. If we can’t tell the difference between reasonable and unreasonable claims, we become susceptible to the claims of charlatans, scoundrels, and mountebanks.”

Disreputable journalism has become widespread, and few in the profession consider speaking truth to power as part of their responsibilities. In this anti-intellectual climate, arrogant and unqualified politicians broadcast false and misleading statements on issues ranging from vaccines, human reproduction, stem cell research, the origins of the Earth, and human evolution, to the state of the biosphere, that are contrary to overwhelming historical and scientific evidence.

Unfortunately, many people are willing to listen to and believe conspiracies, lies and false information rather than rely on experts who have scientific evidence to back up their claims. Here are some examples: ?“Bill Gates created the coronavirus;” “the virus is no more dangerous than the seasonal flu;” “Coronavirus is a ‘fake news’ hoax manufactured by the news or the Democratic Party;”??“You can use hand dryers, vitamin C, or lemon juice to kill the virus;” “the government will shut down all grocery stores so that no one can buy food.” All of these claims are examples of conspiracies associated with coronavirus that have been perpetrated by social media and in some cases the mainstream media and political leaders.

Lies and disinformation filters down to millions of Americans who may not regularly follow the news, but who instead receive their information through ill-informed family and friends posting on social media.

And studies have shown that the American public enthusiastically supports and believes the lies and misinformation promulgated by celebrities, professional athletes and actors.

Diane S. Claussen, in her article in Academe , a publication of the American Association of University Professors, argues “the US news media engages in anti-intellectualism, not by failing to cover or hire intellectuals (although they do this, too) but by portraying intellectuals in ways that are explicitly or implicitly negative. In this, the US news media are in the mainstream of American culture.” In her book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Media , she says of media coverage of college life, “what I found was the ‘college years’: coverage overwhelmingly portraying colleges and universities as places where students play and watch sports, date and possibly marry, drink and take drugs, protest, join fraternities and sororities, go on vacation, avoid the draft, escape their parents, and network and apply for jobs Americans who do attend college might be excused if they think that learning is not the top priority in higher education,” and “Extremely rare are statements such as those made in the New Yorker by Rebecca Mead, who wrote that ‘an argument might be made in favor of a student’s pursuing an education that is less, rather than more, pragmatic,’ or in Time by Ramesh Ponnuru, who wrote that ‘the purpose of a liberal-arts education is to produce well-rounded citizens rather than productive workers.’”

US news media could not maintain their anti-intellectualism without widespread public acceptance, but schools of journalism must accept their share of the blame. US journalists historically came from blue-collar backgrounds; nineteenth-century newspapers were staffed by one or two college-graduate editors and high school–dropout reporters. Clausen points out that the “percentage of US journalists with college degrees did not reach 50 percent until about 1970 but has kept increasing since then. Today, close to 100 percent of journalists have bachelor’s degrees and well over 50 percent have journalism degrees.” Clausen says, “Journalism schools thus had a historic opportunity to become a pro-intellectual force in US mass media. They largely failed.”

Clausen ends her article with this stinging indictment of anti-intellectualism in higher education: “If US higher education’s future is dependent on mass public opinion, that mass public opinion is largely dependent on the news media, and journalism is a counterintuitively anti-intellectual profession staffed primarily by graduates of anti-intellectual journalism schools, it is no surprise that public funding of higher education was declining before the Great Recession, that graduation rates barely creep up, and that what members of the general public know about universities is usually limited to their semi-professional sports programs (which are incorrectly assumed to be profitable). US colleges and universities, including their J-schools, need to improve their products: their curricula and their graduates.”

YouTube said it has removed more than 30,000 videos since October 2020 when it started banning false claims about COVID-19 vaccinations. Since February 2020, it has removed over 800,000 videos related to dangerous or misleading coronavirus information, said YouTube spokeswoman Elena Hernandez, according to the AP article.

In his book,?The Cult of the Amateur , ?Andrew Keen?warned that facttual knowledge ?is being replaced with “the wisdom of the crowd”, dangerously blurring the lines between fact and opinion, informed argument and wild speculation.?

Many misogynist and white supremacist memes, in addition to a lot of fake news, originate or gain initial momentum on sites such as 4chan and Reddit – before accumulating enough buzz to make the leap to Facebook and Twitter, where they can attract more mainstream attention. Renee DiResta, who studies conspiracy theories warned in the spring of 2016 that the algorithms of social networks – which give people news that is popular and trending, rather than accurate or important – are helping to promote conspiracy theories.

Anti-Intellectualism in Politics

Anti-intellectualism has shown itself to be a successful strategy for appealing to key voter segments in American elections.

In the 1952 presidential race, Dwight Eisenhower accused his opponent?Adlai Stevenson, the former governor of Illinois, of using “aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.” Eisenhower said that no one except “business failures, college professors, and New Deal lawyers” would take jobs in Washington D.C. says Elvin Lim in his book, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency .

Spiro Agnew, Vice President during the Nixon administration, called the press “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”

Anti-intellectualism rhetoric showed up in the subsequent campaigns of Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Trump to convey an image of strong leadership not reliant on expert knowledge or people to make decisions.

?As Susan Jacoby points out in The Dumbing of America , in the Washington Post, “our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just ‘folks,’ a patronizing term … [often used] in important presidential speeches before 1980.” Even today, President Biden often uses the term “folks” in reference to people, giving the impression of down-to-earth common person.

Former Republican Congressman Paul Broun (R-Ga.) said in a recent speech that evolution and the big bang theory are “lies straight from the pit of Hell.” “God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell,” said Broun, a medical doctor. “It lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.” He said in his speech, “You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.”

Former Republican Senator Jim Inhofe, who was chairman of a Senate environmental panel brought a snowball into the chamber as evidence that climate change was a hoax. Inhofe published a book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, where he repeated his frequent claim that human-influenced climate change is impossible because “God’s still up there.” Inhofe cited Genesis 8:22 to claim that it is “outrageous” and arrogant for people to believe human beings are “able to change what He is doing in the climate.”

According to a?Pew Research study, ?there is a wide divide along party lines in terms of how they view the experts and scientific evidence.

The Pew study reported that more Democrats (43%) than Republicans (27%) have “a great deal” of confidence in scientists – a difference of 16 percentage points. The gap between the two parties on this issue (including independents who identify with each party, respectively) was 11 percentage points in 2016 and has remained at least that large since.

In the Pew study it was also reported there are also clear political divisions over the role of scientific experts in policy matters, with Democrats more likely to want experts involved and to trust their judgment. Most Democrats (73%) believe scientists should take an active role in scientific policy debates. By contrast, most Republicans (56%) say scientists should focus on establishing sound scientific facts and stay out of such policy debates. The two political groups also differ over whether scientific experts are generally better at making decisions about scientific policy issues than other people: 54% of Democrats say they are, while 66% of Republicans think scientists’ decisions are no different from or worse than other people’s. Finally, Democrats and Republicans have different degrees of faith in scientists’ ability to be unbiased; 62% of Democrats say scientists’ judgments are based solely on facts, while 55% of Republicans say scientists’ judgments are just as likely to be biased as other people’s.

In his article in?The Guardian,? Michiko Kakutani argues “from post-modernism to filter bubbles, ‘truth decay’ has been spreading for decades. How can we stop alternative facts from bringing down democracy?” he asks. He says, “Two of the most monstrous regimes in human history came to power in the 20th century, and both were predicated on the violation and despoiling of truth, on the knowledge that cynicism and weariness and fear can make people susceptible to the lies and false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power.”

Kakutani contends it’s not just fake news either: “it’s also fake science (manufactured by climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers, who oppose vaccination), fake history (promoted by Holocaust revisionists and white supremacists), fake Americans on Facebook (created by Russian trolls), and fake followers and ‘likes’ on social media (generated by bots). Donald Trump, the 45th president of the US, lies so prolifically and with such velocity that the?Washington Post calculated he’d made thousands of false or misleading claims during his three years in office. He routinely assails the press, the justice system, the intelligence agencies, the electoral system and the civil servants who make the US government tick.”

Miami University anthropology professor H. Sidky has argued that 21st-century anti-scientific and pseudoscientific approaches to knowledge, particularly in the United States, are rooted in a postmodernist “decades-long academic assault on science.” He writes: “Many of those indoctrinated in postmodern anti-science went on to become conservative political and religious leaders, policymakers, journalists, journal editors, judges, lawyers, and members of city councils and school boards. Sadly, they forgot the lofty ideals of their teachers, except that science is bogus.”

As Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway argue in their book?Merchants of Doubt ,? "Right-wing think tanks, the fossil fuel industry, and other corporate interests that are intent on discrediting science have employed a strategy first used by the tobacco industry to try to confuse the public about the dangers of smoking. ?'Doubt is our product,' read an infamous memo written by a tobacco industry executive in 1969, 'since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.'"

The strategy is to have pseudo scientists and professionals refute established science; turn these false arguments and lies into talking points and repeat them over and over; and launch a personal attack on the real scientists on the other side. It’s a tactic that’s been on matters ranging from gun control to building a border wall.

What Oreskes and Conway call the “tobacco strategy” was helped, they argue, by elements in the mainstream media that tended “to give minority views more credence than they deserve”. They say, “This false equivalence was the result of journalists confusing balance with truth-telling, wilful neutrality with accuracy; caving in to pressure from right-wing interest groups to present ‘both sides’; and the format of television news shows that feature debates between opposing viewpoints – even when one side represents an overwhelming consensus and the other is an almost complete outlier in the scientific community.” The classic example of the ridiculousness of this approach was exposed by John Oliver in his Emmy Award Winning Show Last Week Tonight, in which he had 100 climate scientists on one side of the desk vs a single politician on the other side to debate global warming, to illustrate how the scientific news should be shown.

Enter the Age of Artificial Intelligence

AI can accentuate distrust of scientific experts and intellectuals to a higher degree with potential disaster. People can now use AI programs to produce fake videos, audio, and visual images to illustrate non-existent events and people doing and saying things that don’t exist. And it’s clear this influences the public and could change public opinion and behaviour.

?What Can Be Done About It?

The continuing trend of anti-intellectualism, anti-science and anti-expert, combined with the growth of disinformation, fake news, an media manipulation can only serve to seriously damage American democracy.

Here are some suggestions taken from various sources that should be considered:

• Take the time to check out if information is accurate or true. Ann M. Ravel and Margaret Sessa-Hawkins in their article about disinformation explain: “The first step to stopping misinformation is to recognize it — especially when a story or post looks to be going viral. Social media is optimized for engagement, not accuracy, and it can be?very hard ?to spot false news stories. If you don’t recognize the news outlet or the sources cited, do an online search to see whether they are reputable. If an individual is being cited, research them. Do they have expertise in the subject they are speaking about? If no source is cited, check if any well-known outlets are reporting on the information. Lastly, check the date. In fast-changing situations (like a pandemic or an election) where new information is emerging constantly, the age of a story is extremely relevant.” The authors reference a number of fact checking resources that can help: “For the coronavirus crisis, the International Fact-Checking Network?has created ?a WhatsApp chat bot that gives users access to more than 4,800 fact-checks in 43 languages; authorities like the WHO and CDC are also trustworthy resources. Fact checkers (like?Snopes ) are also a good port of call for general news stories. Reputable sources such as local news outlets and election officials (for voting matters) are also good to check, as they may carry smaller stories that fact-checkers will have missed.
• Refute something you read, hear or see that is a lie or misinformation. It’s all too easy to be part of the bystander effect when we see or hear an injustice. Obviously, we will want to be sure of the facts with the support of evidence. While it may be easier to verify false information circulated by friends or work colleagues, it’s much more challenging if it’s a family member. In fact, conflicts over false information have resulted in family and friend breakups. At least call out disinformation you see online . One-on-one conversations are preferable with a close relationship since we are?more likely ?to listen to people we have a good relationship with.
• Actively advocate for government and institutional action and reforms. While recognizing and refuting disinformation is a good skill to have, disinformation isn’t going to disappear (or even significantly drop) without systemic reform by government, institutions and organizations. If we want change, we need to work to pressure both companies and legislators to make stopping disinformation a priority. Without public and governmental pressure, media giants like Facebook are slow and reticent to take the initiative to be vigilant. Legislative reforms that show who is paying for a communication people see on social media sites are a step in the right direction. Two legislative bills introduced in the House of Representatives, the “Protecting Democracy from Disinformation Act” and the “Banning Microtargeted Political Ads Act,” would be good beginning steps. Along with legislation, companies should still be encouraged to implement their own policies evenly and point users towards reliable sources of information (such as the CDC, local news outlets, and election officials), and not publish or support disinformation and false claims. It is important for news organizations to?call out fake news and disinformation?without legitimizing them. They can do this by relying upon their in-house professionals and well-respected fact-checkers. Investigative reporters have never been so valuable. In order to educate users about news sites that are created to mislead, non-profit organizations such as Politifact, Factcheck.org , and Snopes judge the accuracy of leader claims and write stories detailing the truth or lack thereof of particular developments. Research by Dartmouth College Professor Brendan Nyhan has found that labeling a Facebook post as “disputed” reduces the percentage of readers believing the false news by 10 percentage points. In addition, Melissa Zimdars, a communication and media professor at Merrimack College, has created a list of 140 websites that use “distorted headlines and decontextualized or dubious information.”?This helps people track promulgators of false news.
• Technology firms should?invest in technology to find fake news and identify it for users?through algorithms and crowdsourcing. There are innovations in fake news and hoax detection that are useful to media platforms. For example, fake news detection can be automated, and social media companies should invest in their ability to do so. Former FCC Commissioner Tom Wheeler argues that “public interest algorithms can aid in identifying and publicizing fake news posts and therefore be a valuable tool to protect consumers.” Companies shouldn’t be able to make money from fake and false news manufacturers and should?make it hard to monetize hoaxes. Like all clickbait, false information can be profitable due to ad revenues or general brand-building. While social media platforms like Facebook have made it harder for users to profit from fake news, ad networks can do much more to stop the monetization of fake news, and publishers can stop carrying the ad networks that refuse to do so.
• Finally, prioritize putting an emphasis on the value of a civic education in the school system and higher education which includes teaching critical thinking skills, and a revitalization of a liberal education. America’s educational standards have declined significantly in the past decade in comparison to other advanced countries. If policymakers and other leaders place a higher value on an educated and critical-thinking public, it could be a powerful force in arresting America’s current declining democracy.

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