Posts Tagged ‘disinformation’
“Truth does not do so much good in the world, as the appearance of it does evil”*…
Joshua Benton on the way that we handle misinformation as elections stakes rise…
… Giving someone a meaningful incentive on a mental problem can lead them to work harder and have a better chance of getting it right. That’s also true for a very specific kind of mental problem: figuring out whether to believe some random headline you see on social media….
[Benton cites several studies that conform this generalization…]
There’s a consistent thread here: If people don’t see a reason to bring their full mental capacity to bear on a question, they probably won’t. We’re lazy! But when the stakes are a little higher — when there’s a little more reason to bring our A-game — we can do better.
Let’s transfer that idea into politics. After all, there’s usually no direct reward for sussing out a fake headline in your News Feed, or for detecting when a claim about a politician edges from plausible to laughable. In day-to-day life, a single bit of political wrongness is unlikely to impact your life one whit. So why summon up the brain power?
But what if the stakes were suddenly higher — say, just hypothetically, if it was a presidential election season and the country is being presented with two wildly different potential futures? Would people then summon up more of their mental capacity to separate good information from bad? Pundits have long said most voters only “get serious” about an election a few weeks before the big day — maybe that new seriousness might mean a stricter adherence to the facts?
That’s one of the issues addressed by a new paper by Charles Angelucci, Michel Gutmann, and Andrea Prat — of MIT, Northwestern, and Columbia, respectively. Its title is “Beliefs About Political News in the Run-up to an Election“; here’s the abstract, emphasis mine:
This paper develops a model of news discernment to explore the influence of elections on the formation of partisan-driven parallel information universes. Using survey data from news quizzes administered during and outside the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the model shows that partisan congruence’s impact on news discernment is substantially amplified during election periods. Outside an election, when faced with a true and a fake news story and asked to select the most likely true story, an individual is 4% more likely to choose the true story if it favors their party; in the days prior to the election, this increases to 11%.
Did you catch that? People aren’t more likely to evaluate accuracy correctly during the fever pitch of an election season — they’re less likely, and by a meaningful margin…
[Benton explains the methodology of the study and explores some examples of it more specific findings…]
… In a sense, it all comes down to what you mean by “high stakes.” Yes, a presidential election is high stakes for the country at large. But believing something that supports your ideological priors is high stakes for your ego — especially at the height of an all-consuming campaign. Our brains want to believe the best about our side and the worst about the other. And it seems that overrides any extra incentive for accuracy at the moment our votes matter most…
“Are people more likely to accurately evaluate misinformation when the political stakes are high? Haha, no,” from @jbenton and @NiemanLab.
* François de la Rochefoucauld, Maximes
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As we think, we might spare a thought for Andrew Russell “Drew” Pearson; he died on this date in 1969. A journalist known for his long-running column, “Washington Merry-Go-Round.”
At the time of Pearson’s death (of a heart attack) in Washington, D.C., the column was syndicated to more than 650 newspapers, more than twice as many as any other, with an estimated 60 million readers, who devoured the investigative and “insider”-centered approach to political coverage that Pearson pioneered– and that has become the milieu for the misinformation discussed above. A Harris Poll commissioned by Time magazine at that time showed that Pearson was America’s best-known newspaper columnist. The column was continued by Jack Anderson and then by Douglas Cohn and Eleanor Clift, who combine commentary with historical perspectives. It is the longest-running syndicated column in America.
“What shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”*…
A.W. Ohlheiser on a new book, Invisible Rulers— an investigation of the ways in which technology has transformed power and influence– by Renée DiResta, a leader of the late, lamented Stanford Internet Observatory…
… The book examines and contextualizes how bad information and “bespoke realities” became so powerful and prominent online. She charts how the “collision of the rumor mill and the propaganda machine” on social media helped to form a trinity of influencer, algorithm, and crowd that work symbiotically to catapult pseudo-events, Twitter Main Characters, and conspiracy theories that have captured attention and shattered consensus and trust.
DiResta’s book is part history, part analysis, and part memoir, as it spans from pre-internet examinations of the psychology of rumor and propaganda to the biggest moments of online conspiracy and harassment from the social media era. In the end, DiResta applies what she’s learned in a decade of closely researching online disinformation, manipulation, and abuse, to her personal experience of being the target of a series of baseless accusations that, despite their lack of evidence, prompted Rep. Jim Jordan, as chair of the House subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government, to launch an investigation.
There’s a really understandable instinct that, I think, a lot of people have when they read about online misinformation or disinformation: They want to know why it’s happening and who is to blame, and they want that answer to be easy. Hence, meme-ified arguments about “Russian bots” causing Trump to win the presidential election in 2016. Or, perhaps, pushes to deplatform one person who went viral by saying something wrong and harmful. Or the belief that we can content-moderate our way out of online harms altogether.
DiResta’s book explains why these approaches will always fall short. Blaming the “algorithm” for a dangerous viral trend might feel satisfying, but the algorithm has never worked without human choice. As DiResta writes, “virality is a collective behavior.” Algorithms can surface and nudge and entangle, but they need user data to do it effectively…
…
…So, what would work?
DiResta’s ideas for this echo conversations that have been happening among misinformation experts for some time. There are some things platforms absolutely should be doing from a moderation standpoint, like removing automated trending topics, introducing friction to engaging with some online content, and generally giving users more control over what they see in their feeds and from their communities. DiResta also notes the importance of education and prebunking, which is a more preventative version of addressing false information that focuses on the tactics and tropes of online manipulation. Also, transparency…
Misinformation: “Why lying on the internet keeps working,” @abbyohlheiser in @voxdotcom.
DiResta on her experience of harassment while at the Internet Observatory: “My Encounter with the Fantasy-Industial Complex” (gift article)
For more on prebunking, see “Fact or Fake? The role of knowledge neglect in misinformation” (source of the image above.
Also apposite: “Is social media fueling political polarization?“
On the other hand, there’s this consideration of misinformation in the larger epistemological context of all of the information available to us: “How Dangerous is Misinformation?“: “The problem with alarmism about “misinformation” is not that it is too pessimistic about the state of media and public discourse. The problem is that it is not pessimistic enough.” Caveat lector.
* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
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As we steel ourselves, we might recall that it was on this date in 1947 that Kenneth Arnold reported a UFO sighting; Arnold claimed that he saw a string of nine, shiny unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier (in Washington State) at speeds that he estimated at a minimum of 1,200 miles an hour.
His was the first post-World War II sighting in the United States that attracted nationwide news coverage and is credited with being the first of the modern era of UFO sightings– including numerous reported sightings over the next two to three weeks. Arnold’s description of the objects led the press quickly to coin the terms flying saucer and flying disc as popular descriptive terms for UFOs.
After the 1947 UFO sighting, Arnold became famous “practically overnight.” Arnold’s daughter would later recall the family receiving 10,000 letters and constant phone calls. In the 1960’s Arnold entered politics, running as a Republican for Lieutenant Governor of Idaho. He lost to the Democratic incumbent.
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history”*…
… and of their present. Anne Applebaum explores the ways in which autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world…
… Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society. The strength of these demonstrations, and the broader anger they reflected, was enough to spook the Chinese Communist Party into lifting the quarantine and allowing the virus to spread. The deaths that resulted were preferable to public anger and protest.
Like the demonstrations against President Vladimir Putin in Russia that began in 2011, the 2014 street protests in Venezuela, and the 2019 Hong Kong protests, the 2022 protests in China help explain something else: why autocratic regimes have slowly turned their repressive mechanisms outward, into the democratic world. If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. That requires more than surveillance, more than close observation of the population, more than a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan: a narrative that damages both the idea of democracy everywhere in the world and the tools to deliver it…
…
… the story of how Africans—as well as Latin Americans, Asians, and indeed many Europeans and Americans—have come to spout Russian propaganda about Ukraine is not primarily a story of European colonial history, Western policy, or the Cold War. Rather, it involves China’s systematic efforts to buy or influence both popular and elite audiences around the world; carefully curated Russian propaganda campaigns, some open, some clandestine, some amplified by the American and European far right; and other autocracies using their own networks to promote the same language…
…the convergence of what had been disparate authoritarian influence projects is still new. Russian information-laundering and Chinese propaganda have long had different goals. Chinese propagandists mostly stayed out of the democratic world’s politics, except to promote Chinese achievements, Chinese economic success, and Chinese narratives about Tibet or Hong Kong. Their efforts in Africa and Latin America tended to feature dull, unwatchable announcements of investments and state visits. Russian efforts were more aggressive—sometimes in conjunction with the far right or the far left in the democratic world—and aimed to distort debates and elections in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and elsewhere. Still, they often seemed unfocused, as if computer hackers were throwing spaghetti at the wall, just to see which crazy story might stick. Venezuela and Iran were fringe players, not real sources of influence.
Slowly, though, these autocracies have come together, not around particular stories, but around a set of ideas, or rather in opposition to a set of ideas. Transparency, for example. And rule of law. And democracy. They have heard language about those ideas—which originate in the democratic world—coming from their own dissidents, and have concluded that they are dangerous to their regimes…
The origins and the operations of today’s all-too-successful authoritarian disinformation efforts: “The New Propaganda War” (gift article) from @anneapplebaum in @TheAtlantic. Eminently worth reading in full.
Apposite: “‘Everyone is absolutely terrified’: Inside a US ally’s secret war on its American critics,” @zackbeauchamp on India’s campaign to threaten and discredit critics of the Modi regime, in @voxdotcom. Plus: “India’s YouTubers take on Narendra Modi” (gift link to @TheEconomist).
* George Orwell
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As we analyze agitprop, we might recall that it was on this date in 1998 that Michael Fortier was sentenced to 12 years in prison and fined $200,000 for failing to warn authorities about the plot to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Carried out by right-wing (white supremacist- and militia-sympathizing) anti-government extremists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the bombing (on April 19, 1995, at 9:02 AM) killed 168 people, injured 680, and destroyed more than one-third of the building, which had to be demolished. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 other buildings and caused an estimated $652 million worth of damage. It was the deadliest act of terrorism in U.S. history before the September 11 attacks in 2001, and still the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.
McVeigh had shared his plans with Fortier (his Army roommate); Fortier had accompanied McVeigh on a scouting trip to the building in advance of the blast; and Fortier had failed to warn officials of the attack.
“The things right in front of us are often the hardest to see”*…
Fake news, like conjuring, plays on our weaknesses — but, as Tim Harford explains, with a little attention, we can fight back…
Why do people — and by “people” I mean “you and I” — accept and spread misinformation? The two obvious explanations are both disheartening. The first is that we are incapable of telling the difference between truth and lies. In this view, politicians and other opinion-formers are such skilled deceivers that we are helpless, or the issues are so complex that they defy understanding, or we lack basic numeracy and critical-thinking skills. The second explanation is that we know the difference and we don’t care. In order to stick close to our political tribe, we reach the conclusions we want to reach.
There is truth in both these explanations. But is there a third account of how we think about the claims we see in the news and on social media — an account that, ironically, has received far too little attention? That account centres on attention itself: it suggests that we fail to distinguish truth from lies not because we can’t and not because we won’t, but because — as with Robbins’s waistcoat — we are simply not giving the matter our focus.
What makes the problem worse is our intuitive overconfidence that we will notice what matters, even if we don’t focus closely. If so, the most insidious and underrated problem in our information ecosystem is that we do not give the right kind of attention to the right things at the right time. We are not paying enough attention to what holds our attention.
The art of stage magic allows us to approach this idea from an unusual angle: Gustav Kuhn’s recent book, Experiencing the Impossible, discusses the psychology of magic tricks.
“All magic can be explained through misdirection alone,” writes Kuhn, a psychologist who runs the Magic Lab at Goldsmiths, University of London. Such a strong claim is debatable, but what is beyond debate is that the control and manipulation of attention are central to stage magic. They are also central to understanding misinformation. The Venn diagram of misinformation, misdirection and magic has overlaps with which to conjure.
[There follows a fascinating unpacking of the relevance of misdirection to to misinformation…]
We retweet misinformation because we don’t think for long enough to see that it is misinformation. We obsess over bold lies, not realising that their entire purpose is to obsess us. We see one thing and assume it is another, even though we are only deceiving ourselves. We will argue in favour of policies that we opposed seconds ago, as long as we can be distracted long enough to flip our political identities in a mirror.
And behind all this is the grand meta-error: we have no intuitive sense that our minds work like this. We fondly imagine ourselves to be sharper, more attentive and more consistent than we truly are. Our own brains conspire in the illusion, filling the vast blind spots with plausible images.
But if you decide to think carefully about the headlines, or the data visualisations that adorn news websites, or the eye-catching statistics that circulate on social media, you may be surprised: statistics aren’t actually stage magic. Many of them are telling us important truths about the world, and those that are lies are usually lies that we can spot without too much trouble.
Pay attention; get some context; ask questions; stop and think. Misinformation doesn’t thrive because we can’t spot the tricks. It thrives because, all too often, we don’t try. We don’t try, because we are confident that we already did…
Simple, but profoundly important, wisdom: “What magic teaches us about misinformation,” from @TimHarford. eminently worth reading in full. (Originally appeared in the Financial Times Magazine, from whence the illustration above.)
Related: the Barnum (or Forer) Effect
* Apollo Robbins, world-famous pickpocket and illusionist
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As we dissect disinformation, we might spare a thought for Oscar Hammerstein; he died on this date in 1919. As a newly-arrived immigrant to the U.S., Hammerstein worked in a cigar factory, where he discovered ways to automate the rolling process. He patented his innovation and made a fortune– which he promptly reinvested in his true passions, music and the arts. Possessed of a sharp sense of design and an equally good acoustical sense, he built and ran theaters and concert halls, becoming one of Americas first great impressarios… a fact worth honoring, as history tends to overlook “Oscar the First” in favor of his grandson, Oscar Hammerstein II, the gifted librettist/lyricist and partner of Richard Rodgers.
“Our beauty lies in this extended capacity for convolution”*…
John Semley contemplates an America awash in junk mail and junk science…
… In the long interregnum between Trump’s loss and his unceremonious retreat from the White House, the postal service would play a critical role in what the pundit class liked to call his Big Lie. He framed mail-in ballots, baselessly, as being especially susceptible to fraud and manipulation. Even before the election, back when he could still avail himself of Twitter, Trump tweeted that such ballots would lead, irrevocably, to “MAYHEM!!!” His lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, freshly clowned-on in the new Borat movie, would likewise crow that hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots tilted the results. Elsewhere, on newly struck TV ads, postal workers were framed as pandemic-era heroes, delivering parcels to communities squirming under stay-at-home orders.
This contest over the image of the postal service—and mail itself—revealed a more profound tension, a deeper crisis facing democracies in America and elsewhere. It is a fundamentally epistemic crisis: about the control and promulgation of information, and how that information comes to shape a worldview, and how those worldviews come to bear on the world itself. And it’s just one front in a war of epistemologies that has been raging since at least the republic’s inception. Because to control the mail, as [Seinfeld‘s] Newman himself once memorably snarled, is to control information.
The control of information is key to any ideological project….
There follows a fascinating historical rumination on postal services and America’s history with information and mis/disinformation, and a consideration of our current moment, replete with insights from observers ranging from Scientific American to Thomas Pynchon– richly informative, genuinely entertaining, deeply provocative, and, in the end, at least mildly optimistic: “America, Ex Post Facto,” from @johnsemley3000 in @thebafflermag.
* Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
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As we scrutinize sense and sensibility, we might recall that it was on this date in 1998 that Clarence E. Lewis Jr. was named Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President of the U.S. Postal Service, becoming the highest-ranking African-American postal employee to that date. He had started his postal career as a substitute city letter carrier in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1966. On his retirement in 2000, he was given the Benjamin Franklin Award, the Postal Service’s highest honor.
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