What is misinformation, anyway?

Misinformation research aims to transcend politics in favour of objective scientific analysis. The broader its definition of the term “misinformation”, the less realistic that ambition is.

A recent article by Kai Kupferschmidt explores “the five biggest challenges facing misinformation research.” The first challenge focuses on how to define misinformation, which “matters because it is the first step in determining how pervasive misinformation is and how much impact it has.”

Background

When misinformation research exploded in prominence in 2016 after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, much of the focus was on fabricated news stories published by disreputable websites (“fake news”). However, it quickly became apparent that such content is relatively rare and not very impactful. In response to this discovery, many have argued that the meaning of “misinformation” should be expanded to encompass more content.

For example, some researchers suggest “misinformation” should refer to “any information that is false”, which would include wrong opinions in addition to fabricated news stories. And some go even further. Kupferschmidt’s article quotes the computational social scientist Jevin West, who observes that “there’s plenty of examples, where things are true, but they are completely misleading, which is a form of misinformation”, as well as misinformation researcher Kate Starbird, who

sees a more fundamental problem with current definitions: They tend to regard misinformation as individual, atomic units of information, such as an article or a tweet. But that overlooks the bigger picture of disinformation… Disinformation campaigns often work by selectively amplifying certain pieces of news, all or most of which can be true, Starbird says. “Disinformation is not a piece of content. It’s a strategy.”

My take

I’m glad that researchers are taking this definitional question seriously. Admittedly, one of a handful of genuine discoveries in philosophy is that concepts don’t need to be definable to be meaningful or useful, including in scientific research. However, without a precise analysis of what the term “misinformation” refers to, it’s difficult to understand many alleged findings in modern misinformation research, let alone evaluate them. For example, one can’t assess whether misinformation is more prevalent on the right of the political spectrum than on the left, as misinformation researchers claim to have discovered, without a clear understanding of what misinformation is.

Nevertheless, Kupferschmidt's overview of the topic, like most discussions of definitional issues in misinformation research, misses the core challenges researchers face. I'll try to be uncharacteristically concise because this is a topic I’ve written about before.

Concepts, definitions, and scientific objectivity

In thinking about how to define “misinformation”, people often conflate two distinct challenges.

The first is how to define the concept so that it picks out the appropriate class of information—that is, the information (e.g., claims, news reporting, commentary, videos, etc.) responsible for causing people within society to adopt costly misperceptions about reality. Call this the definitional challenge.

The second is how to define the concept so that its application—that is, determining which information satisfies the relevant definition—can be an objective scientific matter, not merely a report of researchers’ opinions. Here, the challenge is to address the common criticism of misinformation research that it’s simply a political project dressed up as a scientific one, a strategic attempt by the liberal establishment to recast challenges to its preferred worldview in a deceptively science-sounding vocabulary. Call this the objectivity challenge.

Whereas the definitional challenge is about accurately capturing what misinformation is, the objectivity challenge is about whether researchers can identify instances of that phenomenon scientifically.

An illustration

To appreciate the distinction, consider defining misinformation as “false information”. One can evaluate this definition in two ways.

First, one can ask whether it identifies the class of information misinformation researchers are interested in. The answer to that question is “no”. False information needn’t be misleading (consider irony, fiction, idealised assumptions in science, etc.) and much misleading information isn’t false (consider true but cherry-picked information). In other words, falsity is neither sufficient nor necessary for information to be misinformative.

However, one can also ask a second question: If misinformation is defined as “false information”, could there be an objective science capable of establishing trustworthy generalisations about misinformation? That is, could misinformation research, so understood, be anything more than a subjective report of the political opinions of misinformation researchers?

The answer to that question is also “no”.

To appreciate why, note that misinformation researchers often try to dispel the impression that they think of themselves as universal “arbiters of truth”. However, if you define misinformation as “false information” and you want to establish broad generalisations about it—for example, about its “fingerprints”, people’s “susceptibility” to it, its relative prevalence throughout different parts of the political spectrum, and so on—you must be a universal arbiter of truth.

No human beings, not even misinformation researchers, can attain this status. As Joseph Bernstein writes, “However well-intentioned these professionals are, they don’t have special access to the fabric of reality.”

Reality is complex, the truth is inherently uncertain on many topics, and reasonable disagreement is often inevitable. It’s hard enough to figure out what’s going on even when it comes to incredibly narrow issues, let alone all issues. Even within our most advanced scientific research, most plausible and widely-believed hypotheses are false simply because there are many more plausible ideas than true ones.

The many difficulties of figuring out the truth in politics is why we have political debate and discussion in the first place. If we could be confident a group of experts somehow knew the truth about all relevant issues, there would be no need for such conversation and disagreement. We could all simply defer to their God-like judgment.

Three Lessons

This distinction illuminates why much misinformation research has restricted its focus to online fake news. Such research plausibly satisfies the objectivity constraint by focusing not on falsity generally but on a limited class of unambiguous falsehoods (i.e., outright fabricated news stories).

The problem is that “fake news” is a terrible definition of misinformation from the perspective of the definitional constraint. If you want to understand the sources of popular misperceptions in society, fake news, which is rare and largely preaches to the choir, is mostly irrelevant. Even restricting one’s focus just to news, the overwhelming majority of misleading news isn’t fake news; it’s accurate news that’s selected, framed, packaged, and interpreted in misinformative ways. And, of course, news is just one form of information that most people do not pay close attention to anyway.

The distinction also illuminates why it’s misguided for misinformation researchers to treat the definitional constraint as the only relevant constraint on defining the concept. For example, it’s obviously correct that true information can be highly misleading. Similarly, Starbird’s observation that disinformation campaigns often selectively amplify accurate scraps of information to propagate misleading narratives is correct and insightful. However, it doesn’t follow from such observations that the term “misinformation”, as used by misinformation researchers, should be defined to allow for these possibilities.

Determining whether communication or broader narratives are misleading is incredibly complex. In my view, much popular research and commentary concerning misinformation is, ironically, guilty of amplifying true scraps of information to support the misleading narrative that misinformation is widespread and highly dangerous. Does that make such pieces of information “misinformation” or part of a “disinformation campaign”? In some ways, I think it does. Others vehemently disagree. That disagreement is characteristic of most political debates, which typically involve conflicting narratives about reality among people with different pre-existing beliefs, ideologies, values, and interests.

Finally, distinguishing between the definitional and objectivity constraints illustrates a fundamental dilemma for misinformation research. Either the field can study the misleading information that really matters politically, or it can try to achieve a reputation for scientific objectivity, but it can’t accomplish both.

Ultimately, this dilemma shouldn’t be surprising. There’s a sense in which anyone who participates in politics and political debate must have views about what’s true and, hence, must be concerned with identifying and combatting “misinformation”—the views they think are wrong.

As Jeffrey Friedman observes,

Those with whom one disagrees must—in one’s first-order opinion—be malinformed, whether through inadvertently communicated untruths (misinformation) or those that are deliberately communicated (disinformation).

Of course, very few ordinary people use technical terms like “misinformation” or “disinformation”. They use words like “wrong”, “false”, “stupid”, “ridiculous”, “lie”, “bullshit”, and so on. But the point is that all participants in political debates must implicitly treat the claims of those they disagree with as misinformative or disinformative. Otherwise they wouldn’t disagree with them.

Misinformation research aims to transcend such first-order political debates in favour of objective scientific analysis. The broader its definition of the term “misinformation”, the less realistic that ambition is.