On Humane Tech: Disinformation and Public Health with Evan Thornburg

The Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics hosts a bi-weekly conversation “On Humane Tech,” highlighting relevant news in a conversational format with our team. Each week the topic changes, but one thing stays the same — we want to hear from you. Respond to our conversation below.

This week’s topic: Disinformation and public safety with Evan Thornburg.

Evan Thornburg, better known as EVN the (Bio) Ethicist on TikTok, is an expert in misinformation, conspiracy theories and their effect on public health. They graduated from Temple University with a Master of Arts in Urban Bioethics.

Karina Fitzgerald: I wanted to start by talking about one of the key themes in your thesis, which is this idea of misinformation not just happening by coincidence online; that there is a very real effort to harness and weaponize mass ignorance. How does that happen, and what kind of impacts are we seeing on public health?

Evan Thornburg: The initial really expansive report on disinformation is from Marwick and Lewis, called Disinformation Online. These two researchers came together, and really took an extrapolatory look at disinformation online. It was put out in 2017, but it actually feels like a little ahead of its time, because they break down the organized elements of online harassment events like GamerGate. Those things are sort of the tipping point, but they do a great job of outlining how it is. There’s a lot of intentional design: there’s things like attention hacking, there’s grievance economy, there’s utilizing or weaponizing the grievance economy.

One thing that’s very, very prevalent and important is more aged professionals in the sphere, especially because technology is moving so quickly, still look at the Internet in the way that I looked at it when I was 12. It’s sort of like when you had LiveJournal — that realm is no longer this sort of child-like, exploratory playground of fan fiction and cat memes. It does have a lot of really intentional design to it; particularly, disinformation does.

One of the ways I discuss how it affects health is because it leads to the rise of things like lone wolf events. More and more, we’re seeing things like mass shootings, and when police and other law enforcement are doing more and more exculpatory look on these mass shootings, they’re seeing that these people had built up ideologies that were in group spaces. We are physically less safe in space because we can’t even predict where this sort of violence is going to up crop or occur.

It also has a deep impact on our psychological experience. It both takes advantage of pre-existing psychological issues, but it also deepens, worsens or creates them.

I think the most important one is that disinformation has really expansively influenced legislation — and if you know anything about government, it is really hard to undo really bad governance.That’s making us sicker. If we’re designing laws at the municipal state or a federal level that are saying things like, ‘we want to block anybody who’s had mRNA technology from donating any sort of tissue in the state.’ That’s real legislation that was introduced.

There’s a myriad of ways that it really affects public health, and we’re probably shortening our lives if we’re not addressing it.

Fitzgerald: You talk about in your thesis as well, this obligation of people who work in public health or experts in areas that affect public health to engage with the public more, to kind of establish dialogue. You are exemplifying that as EVN the (Bio) Ethicist on TikTok. What’s that experience been like?

Thornburg: I started sharing on TikTok when I started working on the thesis, and it was just me having no one else to talk about these things to. There’s a small, scrappy group of us that want to talk about ethics all the time, and then there’s everybody else. And then there’s also, unfortunately, people who have not had a lot of the preparation to have a conversation around the underpinnings of philosophy, or what goes into ethics. A lot of people have very dichotomous minds, so when you try to have a conversation around ethics with them, they really want to come to a good or a bad place rather than have an exploratory discussion of ‘what does this mean for us?’

I started placing it on social media partly to see whether we have to be a small band of nerds, or can anybody really engage in this? Are they just missing the opportunities because we don’t teach it in high school? What I’m finding is that people are like, ‘I really want to engage in this. I want to learn how to be more critical of my thoughts. I want to be more reflective of the decisions I make. I want to stop being so severe in my answers to things, but I I don’t know how or I’ve never questioned that in this way.’

It’s been really fun. I think I’m in the comments a lot more than any other creator, because I like the conversation that these things generate. Really, the video is a stimulation point.

I’ve met like 4 other bioethicists on TikTok as creators, which feels like an amazing amount! I probably have now met 50% of the ones that exist, and we all have different perspectives. There is Charlie Peterson, whose background is philosophy, which can sometimes hit in a different way for people than my perspective in public health. A lot of people really like talking about the real-world applications of ethics on my page. And then there’s another, Samia Hearst, who is a bioethicist, and she’s a practicing physician in Switzerland. So again, different perspectives that have been really interesting.

Sarah Florini: I was really fascinated, and I kind of wanted to circle back and follow up with what you said about mental health, because you said that social media can deepen, worsen, or create mental health issues. I teach a lot of undergraduates talking about technology, and I feel like this is a conversation that we’re having in the classroom of, ‘Is Gen Z depressed and anxious because of social media? Or are they depressed and anxious because the world is on fire, and we just see it on social media? Or is there some kind of mutually reinforcing relationship?’ I don’t have answers to those. I only have questions. I was wondering your thoughts.

Thornburg: The research that I consumed talks about saturation; saturation of anything. I mean, you can drown on dry land if you drink too much water, essentially. What we’re talking about is the difference between a population, Gen Z, that has grown up with a 24/7 media cycle. I can access information on network media sites like CNN every hour of the day, any day of the week. Take it back to my mother’s generation, to 2 or 3 generations back, the Boomer generation, where information, and especially things like world news, was all sequestered into a particular point of the day, and not on the weekends.

Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t know about things ongoing as they occur, but I am saying that the ability to pull up the news on my cell phone, or the ability to pull up CNN’s posts that they would have reposted onto my social media is an oversaturation point.

Everything’s trying to compete in the attention economy so much, I think it would behoove us to maybe start to edit. Because there’s really not that much news occurring 24/7. What’s happening is that there’s a lot of revisiting news. That’s why we see a rise in things like punditry, because that’s what fills 24/7 space. If you tell me that there was a tornado in Oklahoma, that’s the news — that’s it. But that doesn’t fill all 24 hours of the day. So we need somebody to talk about the threats of tornadoes; we need somebody to talk about how tornadoes might not be real. It’s too much. I think we would do better to edit.

On top of that, it is the way that social media mistreats people, I mean algorithms especially, and how they target people. There’s even algorithms that are relational to where your IP address is located. It’s not always about your interest, it’s also about where you’re located.

Tech firms have figured out that what holds you on a platform is rage farming. There’s only so many cat videos you can consume before you’re like, ‘that’s enough. I think I’m gonna go outside and touch some grass’ because you feel good. You feel like you can participate in your own life, and you have control of it after you’ve watched those cat videos, or kittens playing with puppies, or whatever. Bad news will hold you on a platform infinitely longer.

It’s sort of like in Monster’s Inc, where they make children scream in order to power their city. It is that. I do think that there is a form of media that is equivalent to giggles that would actually power us better, but we would have to monetize things other than attention. We do see it affecting their mental health, even with internal research, like the Facebook research that leaked with the whistleblower around eating disorders.

Florini: I love that Monster’s Inc analogy. I also think you underestimate my ability to consume cat videos.

Fitzgerald: I think also on social media platforms, there’s this kind of spiraling effect that happens with the algorithm. The more content you engage with a certain kind of content, the more you get, and it just goes on, and on, and on.

One example of that that I think of when I look at my feed, I think about all of the explosion of activity that happened around the Titanic submersible. Of course, it was just non stop. You posted a video that really resonated with some people, and not so much with some others. Once again, as happens with so many creators of color, and folks on TikTok who post “controversial topics,” it got flagged for community guidelines. I saw people who were really struck by the things you said, like, “It can be an ethically neutral position to not cheer on the people oppressing you.”

What do you find people interested in talking about? Because, you talk about engaging a lot with folks in the comments for discussion. Do you find that people gather around particular topics, or that they ask you certain kinds of questions?

Thornburg: They ask me all kinds of questions. I mean, unfortunately, the ones that don’t do well algorithm-wise are some of my favorites. Somebody asked me a really great question about qualitative methodology, and I’d love to talk about that. And I knew it wasn’t going anywhere, but I don’t care, because it’s one of my favorite things.

But then, of course, when I’m like, ‘It’s ethically neutral to joke about ostentatiously wealthy people creating their own demise,’ everybody’s like ‘Shut up!’ But we love it.

I try to, first of all, keep my content as politically placid as possible because I am not interested in making political critique or discussion content. I think that kind of content is necessary, but it isn’t the space I am trying to fill. What I mean by that is that, naturally, I’m taking on topics where it’s very clear that I’m pro-choice/pro-abortion all the time, anywhere. But I explain why inside of the realities we see in medicine. I explain it inside the framing of ‘I’m concerned about pregnant people being able to stay alive, and there’s too many different ways that pregnancy can go awry where it needs termination.’ I understand that that is a political stance, but it shouldn’t be. Me taking this position on abortion access is now political because we have deeply and dangerously politicized health precautions and procedures that are designed to provide the most effective and safe care.

I don’t say things like, ‘Oh, look at this video of this joker from this political body.’ That stuff does better. I probably would do better if I did that, but I’m not going to do that.

People want to talk about public health. People want to talk about not understanding certain things. I realize, especially as someone who works in an administrative way, that people don’t know how public health is executed, and how we make the decisions we make. I’ve seen people ask, ‘Why do people stop wanting to wear masks?’ And I can explain there’s actually a theory for that! There’s social research in public health on why people start to become exhausted when you only fear monger them around public health. That goes all the way back to The Blitz campaign in the UK, where people started to just not care that they were walking around outside while bombs were being dropped in London, because they just, at some point, galvanize against the feeling of fear. Fear is a huge motivator in the short term, but terrible over long stretches of time because people tire of living emotionally on edge.

In the research I did in my thesis, one of the things that kept coming up for me that is super important is that people want to know — even the people who consume disinformation. They want to understand this world better. That’s why I don’t like to gatekeep. It’s why I want to simplify and why I like simplifying online. All of my colleagues can tell you, they’re so tired of hearing me talk about health literacy and low health literacy standards. But it’s super important because people want to understand.

I think that’s the silver lining, is that everyone on every side of this issue is trying to learn, and wants to be better, and wants to raise their competency around public health and health knowledge. How do we give that to them?

Fitzgerald: I think that’s a fantastic note to leave on is that — how can we imagine something better for people who want better?

Thornburg: And, how can we make people collaborative? People can be collaborative in their health. We don’t have to speak from an ivory tower. I think too many things are ivory-towered; tech is too ivory-towered, public health is too ivory-towered, medicine is. Knowledge isn’t unidirectional.

When I was getting my degree in bioethics, I would come home to my mother, who lives with me because she lost her job during the pandemic, and I would just share everything I learned. She was so intrigued. Now, if you told this woman two or three years ago that she was going to be interested in this, she would be like, ‘I don’t know what that is and I don’t care, I don’t understand.’ But she was very fascinated!

I think that’s the real thing that’s inspired me in doing this. If she’s interested — and she’s only listening half the time to me because she has dealt with me all my life — then other people are too, and we can include them. And I see that in the work I do outside of the realm of social media, is that people want to be part of it. They need us to give them the information, and we can facilitate that.