With COVID-19 in full-swing and the Zombie Apocalypse upon us, “social media” is again getting the blame for the spread of misinformation.
Australia’s #Toiletpapergate is a poster child for the phenomenon. Someone posted on Facebook that toilet paper comes from China, and would now run out due to the economic impacts of Coronavirus. This misinformation spread on social media like wild fire, and the nation melted down with panic buying of toilet paper, and fist-fights breaking out in supermarkets.
Leaving aside that toilet paper is not only unnecessary, but is in fact a bad idea — commenters are wringing their hands that social media platforms are not doing more to fact-check and stop the spread of misinformation.
That focus, however, is on entirely the wrong place.
When you have an entire population that doesn’t even know the meaning of the word epistemology, this is inevitable — and no amount of hand-wringing and ambulances at the bottom of the cliff are going to impact the effects of this ignorance.
Here is the Oxford dictionary definition of epistemology:
the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.
A couple of examples, to illustrate this:
Ten years ago, my then 8-year-old son came home from school and told me that his teacher and the school forbade the students from using Wikipedia, because “the information was unreliable”.
The public debate around Wikipedia at that time made the same fundamental error that is being made about social media now — a failure to recognise that all information is unreliable, it is just a question of degree.
Epistemology is the study of how you determine the degree of reliability of information. And that is not taught in schools.
Instead, students are taught to unconditionally accept “reliable” sources of information, and to reject “unreliable” ones.
This naive model does not at all prepare them for a reality where there is no teacher who ticks the “correct answer” and puts a cross next to the “wrong answer”.
People wringing their hands about fact-checking on social media are fantasizing about a return to the idyllic facist utopia of school, where unquestionable authorities rule on what is correct information, and what is not.
In teaching my son about Wikipedia, ten years ago, I told him:
Wikipedia articles are not to contain original research. Therefore, a Wikipedia article explicitly cannot be the primary source for any information. You can use Wikipedia, and for anything that you want to quote in your essay, you follow the citation link and quote that. And you want to evaluate the probability of veracity of the original source.
Nobody at that time — not in the education system, not in the media — explained that point: that all information is unreliable to some degree. That is not taught. Nobody is taught how to think critically for themselves — just that the process of acquiring correct (useful) knowledge is one of surrendering to “the correct unquestionable authority”.
That is the underlying, unquestioned assumption that framed all debate about Wikipedia back then, and frames the debate about social media misinformation now.
In 2012, I attended the European Semantic Web Conference Summer School in Crete. Sitting under a shaded cabana beside the Aegean Sea, I was struck that we were discussing the same problems that ancient Greek philosophers contemplated thousands of years ago — issues of identity and provenance of knowledge — only now in the context of the Internet.
We had a visiting scientist from IBM, Chis Welty, speak (here is his presentation). Chris was one of the engineers who worked on Watson, IBM’s artificial intelligence that defeated the human Grand Master on Jeopardy — a game show.
He explained that the biggest challenge they had was not in generating an answer to the questions. That was pretty easy. It was figuring out how to get the AI to evaluate the probability that it had a correct answer. In Jeopardy, you see, competitors are penalised for giving an incorrect answer. So Watson needed to only “press the buzzer” if it was (some degree of) certain it had a winning answer.
This is a issue of epistemology.
Information is best expressed as a vector. Just as velocity is “a speed plus a direction”, information is a fact plus an assessment of the probability of its accuracy.
But no-one is taught that in school. You are taught that there are “right answers” and “wrong answers”. One is 100% correct, and the other is 100% incorrect, and you choose one and fully commit to it as a binary choice. And the entire way the school system is set up reinforces this — both explicitly (teachers telling you that “Wikipedia is unreliable”, and “Encyclopedia Brittanica is reliable”) and implicitly (tests that consist solely of giving the “correct answer”, stripped of any epistemological metadata).
How do you evaluate the probability that some information is true?
People will point to checking Snopes, or some other fact-checking site.
But even that is too late. If someone has no education in epistemology, then — firstly, it doesn’t even occur to them to check; and secondly: they have no education in evaluating what they do find if they try to investigate something. They just cannot do it. Snopes is just another confusing voice in the babble of the Internet for them.
People resist having “the man” become the facist dictator of truth on social media because they don’t trust Facebook. They read one article saying that Facebook should be the trusted source of truth, and then another one telling them that Facebook wants to steal their data.
There were no stories about teachers and Cambridge Analytica when you were in school. You trusted your teacher and the information that they gave you. And, unfortunately, they didn’t teach you to critically evaluate, but rather to “unquestioningly accept information from trusted sources as true”.
So they left you with some information, but nothing about the process of evaluation in an environment with information, often conflicting, with variable probability of accuracy.
You are left with a relationship to information that, in essence, differs little from religious belief.
And the solution to that is not to try to make the world like school, but to make school more like the reality of the world, and equip people with tools to navigate it.
Teach epistemology.
