The next few years will see a looming conflict over trust in information. But have we reached a point where for some people it doesn’t really matter whether something is true as long as it reinforces what they already believe?

You think fake news is going away anytime soon? Think again.

One of the biggest issues to emerge from last year’s Brexit referendum and – particularly – from the US presidential primary and general election campaigns was the degree of trustworthiness of information sources driven by social media. Now a new report from the Pew Research Center, The Future of Truth and Misinformation Online, shows a split in expert opinion over “whether the coming decade will see a reduction in false and misleading narratives online,” saying, ominously: “Those forecasting improvement place their hopes in technological fixes and in societal solutions. Others think the dark side of human nature is aided more than stifled by technology.”

BuzzFeed last week reported on a network of “thousands of suspect Twitter bots working to influence the Brexit debate in the run-up to the referendum” and which subsequently disappeared following the vote. The chairman of the House of Commons Culture Media and Sport Committee has written to Twitter “to ask for more information as to whether there had been “interference” in the UK’s democratic process.”

Meanwhile, the role of Twitter and Facebook in last year’s US vote is still under investigation, with representatives of the tech giants – along with Google – set to give evidence to Congress on November 1st to determine, as The Guardian reports, “the extent the companies were used in a multi-pronged Russian operation to influence the 2016 presidential election.”

In a thoughtful, finely detailed piece for The Atlantic entitled ‘What Facebook Did To American Democracy – And why it was so hard to see it coming’ Alexis Madrigal writes that “What made the election cycle different was that all of these changes to the information ecosystem had made it possible to develop weird businesses around fake news. Some random website posting aggregated news about the election could not drive a lot of traffic. But some random website announcing that the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump definitely could. The fake news generated a ton of engagement, which meant that it spread far and wide.”

Even the most recent elections in the Czech Republic showed how difficult it has become for governments to fight fake news without appearing biased or politicized. As the Washington Post reported: “Sites with questionable content are now being read by about a fourth of all Czechs, according to estimates, and the current government is concerned that many of their owners are supporting the Kremlin in Moscow. There are viral anti-Muslim tirades, incidents are being declared terror attacks without evidence, and false rumors are circulating about NATO and the EU.”

One of the themes of the Pew Report is that those acting “for themselves and not the public good have the advantage, and they are likely to stay ahead in the information wars.”

Many of those who expect no improvement of the information environment said those who wish to spread misinformation are highly motivated to use innovative tricks to stay ahead of the methods meant to stop them. They said certain actors in government, business and other individuals with propaganda agendas are highly driven to make technology work in their favor in the spread of misinformation, and there will continue to be more of them.

 

A number of respondents referred to this as an “arms race.” David Sarokin of Sarokin Consulting and author of “Missed Information,” said: “There will be an arms race between reliable and unreliable information.” And David Conrad, a chief technology officer, replied, “In the arms race between those who want to falsify information and those who want to produce accurate information, the former will always have an advantage.”

 

Some respondents expect a dramatic rise in the manipulation of the information environment by nation-states, by individual political actors and by groups wishing to spread propaganda. Their purpose is to raise fears that serve their agendas, create or deepen silos and echo chambers, divide people and set them upon each other, and paralyze or confuse public understanding of the political, social and economic landscape.

 

Unburdened by fact

The concept of fake news, of course, is nothing new. As long as there has been the means of creating information and distributing it to information consumers, there have always been those who would seek to undermine that relationship, for whatever ends.

As Mark Twain – or Winston Churchill, or probably both of them – may have famously said, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on.

But it seems reasonable to argue now that we’ve moved beyond a “post-truth” world and are now in a “post-trust” environment, where the doubt being deliberately cast on traditional media outlets for political ends is coinciding with the broader authority of established institutions being diminished by a feeling-over-fact populism – what Stephen Colbert called “Truthiness” back in 2005; the idea that if something “feels” right, then it’s right as far as you believe, and no-one can tell you otherwise.

Originally published in the New York Times.

A couple of recent books that address this phenomenon and its implications for politics and democracy are The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols and Fantasyland – How America Went Haywire by Kurt Andersen; while three timely books on media in a post-truth world are by Matthew d’Ancona, James Ball and Evan Davis. As Nick Cohen writes in The Guardian, kicking off his review of the triumvirate: “If the medium is the message, the message of the web is ‘bullshit’”.

In such an environment, therefore, is it really surprising that 46 per cent of voters – not 46 per cent of Trump supporters – believe “the news media fabricate news stories about President Donald Trump and his administration.” But with the people making up Trump’s base consistently saying they trust him more than the media, it’s no wonder that Philip Bump wrote in the Washington Post recently that the President has “already largely won his war against the media.”

With confirmation bias being the accepted political starting point, therefore, it’s almost as if George Costanza was prophetic when he told Jerry Seinfeld: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”

In another contribution to the Pew Report, Amy Webb, author and founder of the Future Today Institute, wrote:

In an era of social, democratized media, we’ve adopted a strange attitude. We’re simultaneously skeptics and true believers. If a news story reaffirms what we already believe, it’s credible – but if it rails against our beliefs, it’s fake. We apply that same logic to experts and sources quoted in stories. With our limbic systems continuously engaged, we’re more likely to pay attention to stories that make us want to fight, take flight or fill our social media accounts with links. As a result, there are strong economic forces incentivizing the creation and spread of fake news. In the digital realm, attention is currency. It’s good for democracy to stop the spread of misinformation, but it’s bad for business.

But in case you’re getting increasingly despondent, the Report is not completely downbeat in its reading. Some of the experts it features suggest that technology will allow platforms to better control their output environment “to embed moral and ethical thinking” which will allow for screening of content “while still protecting rights such as free speech.”

It also suggests that increased sophistication among users and expanded education in media literacy from a high-school level will help citizens better understand and react to the various information sources they are exposed to. (We mentioned the Czech Republic’s fake news problem earlier, yet ironically their media education seminars are seen as role models).

 

So, as an information consumer, what do you think?

This is a hugely important issue that appears to grow in incidence and reach by the day. Take a look at the detail of the Pew Report and some of the other links here and let us know what you think about the future reliability of information. Are you generally optimistic or pessimistic? Why?

Do you believe the pendulum will swing back towards rationality – either as a result of improved technological means of identifying and stopping the distribution of fake information, or the development of a more sophisticated information consumer?

Or… are we destined to endure muddied waters in perpetuity, simply because malicious information distribution is either too lucrative or too difficult to stop, or because readers are generally less inclined to care whether they’re being manipulated if their broader aims – whatever those might be – are being met?

Either way, the information marketplace is going to be awash with challenges; both in terms of getting accurate and meaningful information into the hands of the people who want it; as well as bolstering the credibility of the media outlets that provide it.

And unfortunately, it seems this battle is just starting.


Also published on Medium.