Nature’s Tricksters: What the Animal World Teaches Us About Disinformation
It’s become popular to blame new technologies for the maelstrom of disinformation we face today. According to a Pew Research Center poll in 2023, half of Americans get their news from social media some or most of the time. What’s more, fake news can spread six times faster than real news. And when it comes to artificial intelligence and deepfakes, the writing is on the wall. We’ve become so inured to post-truthism that we rarely bat an eye when people misrepresent the facts. Recently, I started wondering: Do other species face the same problem? Can we learn from their experience?
Disinformation is everywhere we look in nature. Take, for example, the false eye spots on the wings of a butterfly or how a cat arches its back to appear larger when threatened. Other species take the deception game further. Some 285 species of birds fake wing injuries to lure predators away from their nests. The Photuris female firefly is a femme fatale that attracts and eats the males of another species. The male mourning cuttlefish flashes female colors to nearby males to avoid competition during courtship.
But perhaps nature’s most cunning con artist is the fork-tailed drongo. A small bird native to Sub-Saharan Africa, it’s recognizable by its glossy black feathers, red eyes, and hooked bill. At first glance, the drongo’s behavior appears normal: it scans its surroundings from perches, catches insects mid-air, and forages on the ground. But for about a quarter of its biomass intake, the drongo steals food, a practice known as kleptoparasitism.
Like the savviest con artists, the drongo’s deception is built on a foundation of truth. On a typical day, the drongo will issue an alarm call when it spots an approaching predator, such as an eagle. Meerkats and pied babblers in the area learn to recognize the drongo’s warning calls and take refuge in a classic case of interceptive eavesdropping. In this manner, the drongo begins to earn the trust of its neighbors.
However, from time to time, the drongo issues a false alarm. If a meerkat has just caught a scorpion or gecko, it will drop everything and scramble for its burrow. Then the drongo swoops down and steals the meal, effortlessly. Eventually, the meerkats become suspicious, but the drongo can cycle through six alarm calls to keep its victims guessing.
But what happens if the meerkats learn to disregard everything? Well, the drongo has an ace up its sleeve. It can mimic the alarm calls of other species, including the meerkats’ sentries. This effectively swells the drongo’s repertoire to a total of 51 alarm calls. Here the drongo turns into a formidable disinformation machine. John Marzluff, a wildlife biologist at the University of Washington, describes this artifice as “the most sophisticated example of vocal deception outside of [the human] species.”
So what lessons can we draw? First, it’s clear that misinformation in the natural world can be every bit as deleterious as our own. Plenty of issues can seem existential to us, such as the economy, immigration, abortion, gun rights, or crime. When our way of life is threatened, we can feel like a predator is about to descend on us, and we react instinctively — like a meerkat. This is especially true when bad actors intermix lies with truths.
However, unlike the African wilderness, we rarely face life-and-death scenarios that demand split-second decisions. We have time to evaluate messages for bias and falsehoods. Our first line of defense is news literacy, a skill our schools need to get better at teaching. We also have tools like FactCheck and Politifact (to verify the accuracy of statements), AllSides (to gauge the bias of a news source), and online courses on spotting disinformation.
Media platforms also need to play their part in silencing misleading narratives. Meta, for example, pays third-party fact-checkers to identify harmful content, attach warning labels, and demote fake news in your feed. These are valid measures, but misinformation still gets past fact-checkers and readers ignore notices. Platforms like X even eliminated fact-checking for election-related content, rendering them more treacherous.
What about our nation’s newspapers? Can’t they drown out the drongo’s chatter? Unfortunately, today’s best journalism is largely behind paywalls; for example, at the time of writing, an annual digital subscription to the New York Times costs $300. This effectively splits the country into two groups: those who can afford and want to pay for high-quality journalism and those left to navigate the morass of free news.
Our laws aren’t particularly strong either. Today, social media companies are shielded from liability for the content hosted on their platforms under the Communications Decency Act. Congress needs to urgently update the rules. The European Union did so in 2022 with the Digital Services Act, which requires social media companies to curb negative speech and already landed X in hot water over its misleading blue check marks.
In the end, the health of our democracy depends on foiling disinformation. Today, our defenses are riddled with holes, yet I’m optimistic that we’ll recover the truth. It’s normal for society to play catch-up with new technologies. Steps are already being taken to harness AI to detect fake content and the Supreme Court recently upheld the government’s right to ask social media companies to remove misinformation. More importantly, we’re hard-wired as a species to seek the truth and sharpen our epistemology. Being lied to makes us feel small and manipulated — and it’s outright dangerous from an evolutionary perspective.
