Screaming into the void
J.M. Berger
Extremist ideologies, narratives, and propaganda. Author of four books, including "Extremism" (The MIT Press, 2018) and "Optimal" (2020). PhD in criminology from Swansea University School of Law.
Screaming into the void
I stopped writing and talking about misinformation a long time ago. It was too hard to get the balance right. To talk about what misinformation is, and what it does. To depict its propagation across various kinds of media. To describe how it does and doesn’t affect what people think. I had my hands full talking about extremism, and my research in that space was more unique and, in my opinion, important.
I have mostly kept to my resolution, focusing on what I know best and what I can communicate about best. This week, however, I posted a particularly irate observation about some recent online discussions, and I felt like I should make a fuller comment about why I was feeling so irate about this.
My post was sparked by this week’s Platformer newsletter , headlined “The misinformation panic may be over: Three new studies suggest the problem is manageable — and smaller than you might expect. PLUS: What is Joan Donovan’s deal?” To be clear, I am a regular reader of Casey Newton’s work on Platformer and generally find it interesting and useful, this week aside.
The Joan Donovan reference points to an 11,000 plus word article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the Boston University disinformation researcher that I have not yet had time to read and so am not going to comment on right now (except to say I have generally been a fan of her work). It’s a jumping off point for the larger theme of the newsletter, the “misinformation panic may be over” part, which is predicated Casey’s reading of three studies that do not particularly support the idea of a “misinformation panic” nor do they particularly support the idea that it's over.
The first study found that a cluster of 2,107 influential users in a network of 664,391 registered voters on Twitter drove network effects that spread false and misleading news about politics. Platformer cites an article about the study and not the study itself, quoting the article as saying the smallness of the “superspreader” group is “a large claim.” This is neither a large claim nor an especially new idea. It’s so well established that there’s a rule of thumb about it—the 90-9-1 Rule , which goes back to the early 1990s. About 1 percent of users drive most action on a social network. The study is good! It’s good to validate things we know already know or suspect to be true! But this tells us nothing about the “misinformation panic.”
The second study discussed, again quoting third-party reporting, found that deplatforming spreaders of misinformation reduced the amount of misinformation on a platform. Again, this is a good study, but we already have a ton of research going back years to show that deplatforming people is very effective at deplatforming people. Good research? Yes! Game-changing about the nature of misinformation? Hell no!
The third study, Misunderstanding the Harms of Misinformation , was published by Nature and is linked to directly by Platformer, as opposed to the first two. Nature does not, frankly, have a great track record on social media papers, but let’s put that aside for now. This paper asserts that “Public intellectuals and journalists frequently make sweeping claims about the effects of exposure to false content online that are inconsistent with much of the current empirical evidence.” It then goes on to refute via literature review three very specific claims—“that average exposure to problematic content is high, that algorithms are largely responsible for this exposure and that social media is a primary cause of broader social problems such as polarization.” These are far from universally accepted maxims, but the article does point out several cases of media coverage that misstate or distort research on these points. The paper also argues that online misinformation does not drive causal outcomes—i.e., it does not change people’s behavior. The paper cites the role of “traditional media” and “political elites” as primary drivers of misinformation, without acknowledging that traditional media and political elites might simply be the most important consumers of online misinformation. Political conventions and television networks have for years rebroadcast social media posts, and both political and journalistic elites are among the biggest social media junkies in town.
I think this paper’s topline conclusions and overarching arguments are incomplete or misleading, although some of the work under the hood is good and does point to some very fair criticisms of how misinformation is covered and discussed in The Discourse.
But the paper didn’t prompt me to write this newsletter. Rather, it’s how people talk about the paper, including Platformer, which interpreted it (and the other two) as saying “misinformation … just doesn’t seem to be all that effective,” and that “political lies … appear to be a smaller problem than we once feared.”
This is where I started spitting expletives.
Measles is back , after being nearly eradicated in this country. Why, you might ask? Fucking misinformation , I might respond. Is that a smaller problem than we feared? Let’s check in a year or two and see how many kids have died.
That’s not enough? Around 232,000 Americans may have died due to COVID vaccine hesitancy, which was driven extensively by misinformation—and specifically online misinformation. This was not driven primarily by political elites or television news, by the way. It’s easy to forget that Donald Trump once pushed vaccination surprisingly strongly. Online misinformation spilled into the real world, and politicians and irresponsible media personalities followed suit. The number of views of a specific tweet doesn’t matter if the person who saw the tweet goes on TV and repeats its claims.
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About a third of Americans believe the 2020 election was stolen . That sure doesn’t seem like a smaller problem than we feared. In that case, political elites and television were clearly the biggest factor, but you can’t separate online and offline worlds so cleanly. Claims surface on social media, the claims that get traction get picked up by elites and mainstream media. The tweets and posts and “Truths” then get read on television. All. The. Fucking. Time. Are we counting those views? No.
A host of U.S. states are passing laws to ban gender-affirming care and subject trans people to genital inspections. These initiatives are being driven by online misinformation that characterized LGBTQIA+ people as pedophiles and “groomers.” If you don’t believe online misinformation is a big and growing problem, ask the dozens of children’s hospitals that have been targeted by bomb threats over the last few years.??
These are not small problems. People’s lives are at stake. Our democracy is at stake.
As I said at the top of the newsletter, I get that it’s hard to talk about misinformation. It’s hard to talk about what it actually is and how it spreads. It’s hard to explain how a seemingly small number of accounts can create such large effects without seeming to say that it’s a “small problem” because it’s a “small number” of accounts. But these are huge quantifiable harms! People are literally dying, and more people are going to die!
We can and should talk more accurately about the problem. It’s good to point out when hyperbole gets picked up by the media. Researchers should also be more careful about how they describe their results (regardless of what those results show).
But for god’s sake, we’re nowhere near solving this problem .
This is not the time to pat ourselves on the back. It’s not the time to declare the problem “small” and “solvable.” And none of the papers cited in this week’s Platformer support that view. “The misinformation panic is over” does not comport with a world where measles cases are more than doubling year over year, sea levels are rising , and politicians are lining up to preemptively declare the 2024 election rigged and stolen .
It’s as bad as it ever was, and it’s going to get worse.
J.M. Berger is a writer and researcher focused on extremism as a?Senior Research Fellow for the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism (CTEC) at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS). Views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of CTEC or MIIS.?
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