Debunking Disinformation Myths, Part 1: This is Not the "Disinformation Age"
Are we living through an unprecedented informational crisis, disinformation age, or post-truth era? Drawing on a wide range of evidence and arguments, I give some reasons for scepticism.
Since 2016, the liberal establishment in Western democracies has been gripped by intense panic about disinformation, typically defined as the intentional communication of false or misleading content. According to the narrative driving this panic, an unprecedented explosion of disinformation lies at the root of many problems in society, including declining trust in institutions, support for populists and demagogues, rejection of public health advice, and so on. Although this viewpoint takes different forms, it tends to focus on disinformation spread on social media platforms by foreign governments (e.g., Russia), right-wing elites (e.g. Trump, Farage, Orban, Bolsonaro, Tucker Carlson, etc.), and online conspiracy theorists (e.g., Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, etc.).
In many of my previous essays, I have been very critical of this story. Of course, there is no doubt that lies and misleading information are often harmful, that coordinated propaganda campaigns are sometimes at least partly effective, and that lots of communication on social media is inaccurate, conspiratorial, tribal, or just plain stupid in ways that have negative political consequences.
Given this, it is understandable that many people (myself included) are motivated to understand the causes and consequences of false and misleading ideas in society. And it is also understandable that scientists, journalists, politicians, and institutions like the European Union, United Nations, World Health Organization, and World Economic Forum are motivated to debunk dangerous lies and empower citizens to resist their influence.
Nevertheless, the tendency to treat disinformation as the root cause of many of society’s ills—and alleged ills—tends to rest on popular myths about the nature, prevalence, and harms of disinformation. In this six-part series of essays, I am going to identify the five biggest myths in this area (Essays 1-5) and then explain why their popularity carries its own dangers (Essay 6).
Here are the five myths:
We are living through an unprecedented “disinformation age” or “post-truth” era.
Identifying disinformation is a politically neutral task.
Fake news is widespread and highly impactful.
People are easily duped by disinformation.
Disinformation is the leading cause of popular misperceptions.
In this essay, I will consider the first.
Myth #1. We are living through a disinformation age
A recent article published in Scientific American argues that “disinformation is the real threat to democracy”. Here is how it begins:
Disinformation is the coin of the modern realm… We can, however, do something about this crisis of the information age.
As with most commentary on disinformation, the article assumes we are currently living through an informational crisis, often characterised as an unprecedented “infodemic”, “misinformation age”, “disinformation age”, or “post-truth era”. Also as with most commentary on the topic, it does not provide any evidence for this assumption.
This is not surprising. Despite ubiquitous claims that we are living through a unique informational crisis, the truth is that lies, propaganda, baseless conspiracy theories, inaccurate ideologies, and so on are ancient and pervasive features of human societies, and there is no systematic evidence they are more prevalent (relative to good information) or more impactful now than in the past.
In response to this, those who claim we are living through an unprecedented informational crisis typically give two arguments.
The social media age
First, they point to social media, which they claim is a game changer. Whereas media used to be characterised by truth and objectivity, social media is characterised by lies and conspiracy theories. Moreover, although disinformation has always existed, disinformation spreads faster on social media than ever before.
These arguments are not persuasive. To begin with, the idea that mainstream media is or ever was characterised by a high degree of objectivity is absurd. In the United Kingdom, the most popular newspaper has long been The Sun, although it is closely rivalled by The Daily Mail. Both are highly biased and propagandistic, and often extremely nasty. In these respects, they are similar to many other mainstream media outlets. Moreover, even much higher-quality sources (e.g., the BBC, the Financial Times, the New York Times, etc.) have been guilty of incredibly biased and misleading reporting, including burying politically inconvenient stories about Soviet genocides and famines and grossly exaggerating the evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
More generally, what many think of as a mid-twentieth century “golden age of an objective press” was in fact a highly insular, elitist media ecosystem that disproportionately represented the interests and voices of a very narrow segment of society. And even when you set aside political, nationalist, economic, racist, and other biases, scholars have long documented how all media organisations make decisions about what to cover and how to cover it that are shaped by countless factors distinct from the goal of informing audiences. To take just one example, the simple fact that mainstream media reports on an attention-grabbing but highly nonrandom sample of all the bad things happening in the world means that avid news consumers are often grossly misinformed about even very basic statistical trends.
More importantly, the idea that social media is an unprecedented source of dangerous disinformation is not well-supported by evidence.
First, it greatly exaggerates the degree to which people acquire information about politics and current affairs through social media. On average, online news seems to make up just ≈5% of the time people in Western democracies spend on the internet. Moreover, although lots of people (≈50%) say they encounter news on social media, this must be set in context. For example, in the US television news is roughly five times more popular than online news, social media is rarely people’s only source of news, most of the news on social media seems to originate in mainstream sources, and those who are most likely to get their news from social media tend to be the least interested in news and politics anyway.
Second, the median post on social media (whether true or false) has basically no reach at all. This is not the case with content produced by influential elites such as politicians and celebrities, of course, but the views of such elites are typically extensively covered through mainstream media as well.
Third, even though disinformation can spread fast on social media, so can accurate information, and there is no reason to think social media platforms favour the former over the latter. Moreover, information has been able to spread rapidly to large audiences for a long time, including via newspapers, radio, and television, and I am not aware of any evidence showing that the average speed with which elites could reach big audiences used to be slower. In fact, because media tends to be much more fragmented than in the past, it might be slower today. Given this, the main difference here does not seem to concern the average speed with which elite messages reach audiences. It is rather that social media is more competitive and involves less gatekeeping, but this obviously has both costs and benefits.
Finally, there is no good evidence that social media is driving consistent increases in popular misperceptions or any other political trends people are worried about. For example, evidence suggests that conspiracy theorising is not more prevalent than before social media, most citizens do not exist in harmful online echo chambers, and social media algorithms are not sucking people into “rabbit holes”. Further, countries with similar rates of social media use are experiencing very different political trends, and increases in political polarisation in countries like the US long predate the emergence of social media.
Importantly, none of this means that social media has no harmful effects on democracies. But the story here is complex, involving subtle mixtures of costs and benefits that vary across contexts and are difficult to quantify. The simplistic idea that social media has ushered in an unprecedented informational crisis is unsupported by evidence or persuasive arguments.
The Trump age
A second argument points to the lies of Trump and other right-wing populists and authoritarians. According to this reasoning, Trump is a prolific source of harmful disinformation. Given that he is a recent phenomenon in politics, he and perhaps others like him (e.g., Bolsonaro, Farage, etc.) have produced a new disinformation age.
I can see why many people find this reasoning attractive. Trump is undoubtedly a prolific liar. I also think he’s an unusually bad person and a threat to American democracy, and that the Republican Party more broadly is uniquely dysfunctional among major parties in Western countries.
However, politicians have always lied. They lied before Trump and many Democrats and liberal elites lie today. At worst, Trump lies more, or at least more brazenly, but this is not a transformation from a truth era to a post-truth one. It is one politician (and perhaps some others like him) lying an unusual amount.
More importantly, most of Trump’s lies are transparent and idiotic. As I will return to in the fifth essay in this series, the popular idea that Trump is a master manipulator brainwashing millions of Americans into supporting him gets things backwards. It is mostly because so many people support Trump and despise liberal elites and the establishment that they accept his lies, not vice versa. The causes of such sympathies and antipathies are in turn incredibly complex and context-specific, including intense affective polarisation (i.e, voters strongly disliking supporters of the other party) and high rates of institutional distrust among many Republicans, factors which themselves have deep and complex causes that cannot be boiled down to “disinformation”. So even if you think—as I think—that Trump is a bad person, a threat to American democracy, and considerably worse than the average politician, the idea he has created a new era of large-scale brainwashing is not a good theory of modern American politics.
More generally, when it comes to evaluating the informational ecosystem, the narrow-minded focus on the lies of specific politicians in specific countries obscures a much more complex reality. In many ways, the average quality of media coverage in Western democracies has significantly improved over recent decades, becoming more data-driven and better at reporting scientific consensus, and there is no other time in human history when so many people had such ready access to so much high-quality information.
Moreover, the idea that right-wing, anti-establishment movements have driven a general increase in popular misperceptions among the public is not well-supported by evidence. Although some misperceptions in some countries have gotten worse (I will return to Republican election denial in the fifth essay), there is some evidence that basic political knowledge has either remained constant or increased among ordinary citizens, and some harmful misperceptions such as climate change denial have become significantly less prevalent over the past couple of decades.
The bottom line is that the story here is really complex, and the cliché that we are living through an unprecedented informational crisis or “disinformation age” is incredibly misleading.
Some further reading
Here are some interesting things to read on this topic (although note that I don’t agree with everything in them, and I suspect the authors would strongly disagree with at least some of what I have written here and will write in the other essays in this series):
Brendan Nyhan, Facts and myths about misperceptions
Michael Hannon, The politics of post-truth
Lorna Finlayson, What to do with post-truth
Johan Farkas and Jannick Schou, Post-truth, fake news and democracy
Jeffrey Friedman, Post-truth and the epistemological crisis
"the simple fact that mainstream media reports on an attention-grabbing but highly nonrandom sample of all the bad things happening in the world means that avid news consumers are often grossly misinformed about even very basic statistical trends." This is a very true (and rarely understood) fundamental indictment of the whole concept of 'The News'. Paradoxically it can lead to the college 'educated' avid news consumers arguably having an even more distorted picture than the more proletarian. And there is another distortion inherent in mass media: it has afforded a hugely disproportionate voice to the one-track-minded, the 'activist', the mouthy obsessive and the permanently malcontent among us. Anyone who has got a reasonably balanced life is less likely to entirely taken up with it - whether as contributor or consumer.
Interesting as always. However, I have concerns about whether some aspects of this myth contradict other myths you have written about in the past, as well as those you plan to write about in the future. In this essay, you reference 'popular' newspapers like the Sun and the Daily Mail, as well as accounts of celebrities on social media, as sources of propaganda. If this is true, does it mean that people are typically deceived, and that propaganda is effective? I doubt that you accept this implication.