The economics of online misinformation
During the corona pandemic, with ever-changing measures to contain Covid-19, and a lot of uncertainty about the socioeconomic impact of the virus, the public largely depends on social media to stay informed. At the same time, so much false information is disseminated online that the WHO even speaks of an infodemic.
For this month’s blog post we wanted to understand how networks and conspiracy theorists make use of digital spaces to promote their distorted views -apparently so effectively. Where do we get it wrong and what can we do about it? Who is responsible for containing the spread of misinformation?
by Elena Gkiola
Imran Ahmed, founder of the Center of Countering Digital Hate, a London-based advocacy group that counters “hate groups” and individuals from spreading their narratives at major social media outlets sheds light on the above issues.
Q: Can you introduce the Center of Countering Digital Hate to our audience?
A: The Center for Countering Digital Hate is set up to look at the ways in which identity based hate and misinformation is being spread and used by fringe political actors to reach out to new audiences. We look at the constellation of beliefs that comprise the radical world view -whether that’s identity based hate, science misinformation, climate change denial, vaccine denial- we try to understand what are the common themes for populism, such as, for instance, anti-expert sentiment and conspiracies. We also look at how we can counter the ability of these actors to use digital platforms and spread their beliefs. We are really a reaction to the fact that those forces worked out how to use digital spaces faster and more effectively than anyone else and certainly much faster than conventional pro-social forces. In one respect, we are the reaction to this counter-enlightenment set of ideals that they push: intolerance and misinformed opinion rather than scientific facts. We stand for the enlightenment ideals of tolerance and truth.
Q: Is the fake news industry something amorphous or it has a structure, a coordination among central actors?
A: Like any industry, there are multiple players who aren’t necessarily coordinated, but they exist because there is a market for it. There are tools available to allow them to satisfy that market. What they have done is to colonize the spaces in which there is uncertainty and tensions between modernity and our basic psychological impulses: fear and greed. They create myths and spread those myths in order to resolve people’s tension and to give them a satisfaction that they are guessing from other solutions, but they do so with a very cynical end in mind. There is a strong economical impulse underlying a lot of this activity. A large number of players are getting very wealthy of it: whether those are the hate actors and misinformation agents or the social media companies which are allies to them.
Q: How are social media companies allies to them? How do they contribute to those agents’ misinformation/disinformation campaigns?
A: In the case of social media companies, the underlying logic to their algorithms is based on their business models and in order for it to work they have a motivation to increase divisiveness in societies. You have to understand that these are advertising companies. These are companies that provide space in which to advertise to people. That game is about eyeballs: how many eyeballs you can get on your site? So they seek to keep you on the site for as long as possible in order to serve up ads to you. They do that by providing content that’s engaging rather than anything else (i.e. politically correct). So they will promote division and controversy over facts; they will promote misinformation, which is more exciting to engage with. When someone says something that’s wrong, there is a very strong human instinct to correct them, to stress your values, show where you stand. That increases the amount of tension and ultimately it is what keeps people on the site. The algorithm promotes that. From the big tech companies’ perspective that is a good thing. Hence no one sees a timeline anymore of the tweets that they offer people they follow. What we all see is an algorithmically constructed list of content that has the highest likelihood of keeping us scrolling down. That algorithm is based on the logic: “Well, how do we keep them scrolling down?” the answer is by keeping users excited and angry. When a user engages longer with a post the platform has more time to serve ads.
Q: It is due to the business model and the idea that posts which get more attention and engagement are promoted by the algorithm that we (users) end up seeing bad quality content. Is there a way that big techs could be held accountable?
A: we have argued that advertisers have a special capacity and moral duty to do so, given that they benefit from those platforms and that they are their only customers. You and I, we are not the customers of Facebook or Google or Twitter. We are their product. We give them our data. We tell them our feelings, our thoughts, our sentiments, and that information is packaged up and sold as psycho-graphic archetypes to advertisers, who then target us based on whether or not those that we have told them marries up with their profile of who buys their product. That’s why advertisers have access to an incredible tool. We argue though, that they have a particular capacity to change the way that this tool is created. Do they want their brands to essentially being known for doing business with these incredibly toxic spaces that social media platforms have turned to become with the content they promote?
Q: Can we talk for a notion of ethical advertising in the digital world now?
A: The idea of ethical advertising is traced back to the corporate and social responsibility wave in the 1980s and 1990s; the idea that doing the right thing is good for business. An advertiser does need to understand that they will increasingly be held responsible by consumers, if they advertise on those platforms and that there is actually a brand advantage in advertising in an ethical way. Facebook and Twitter do not care what you and I think because they are B2B (business to business) operators. It is B2C (business to consumers) companies and brands that need to think much more carefully about whether or not they want to be associated with platforms like Facebook. Those brands that do business on Facebook are in fact funding the spread of hate and misinformation in our society. Our hope is that we create a revolution, so that the B2C businesses understand that engaging in business with these platforms is no longer an ethical thing to do and in fact it’s a brand damaging thing to do.
Q: We are witnessing the move of high-profile politicians and government representatives to big tech companies. What does it mean for the future relationship between big techs and governments? Can one say that big techs can do politics now or should they be considered as political actors at all?
A: Well frankly, No. They are private companies that operate for the extraction of wealth. There have been big corporations which have massive consequences on the rest of society that we, as society, have regulated before. This is not a difficult thing to do. Think of financial services or energy; think about the Rockefeller Empire or Shell, which is a Dutch-Anglo Company or Chevron etc etc. The negative externalities of their industry — climate change in particular, but also the destabilization of our geopolitics- was managed because there are regulations and institutions in place. The same happened with the financial services industry after the Great Depression. We often hear things like “the total value of this social media company is the same as the GDP of that country” . Well, this is not fair nor sensible comparison. Those are not comparable numbers. Big techs are players within our economy. Our economy is part of our society. Our society is run by government. We have the right and the ability to constrain them. That’s just the way regulation works. Our society has the right to shape economic productivity towards goals that are good for our us. Generating wealth, ideas, technical capacity and jobs is amazing. It’s really important. Nevertheless, without regulation there is no incentive to stop the negative effects. The most important piece of research that we did recently was the polling around corona-virus vaccines. When we asked the public in the UK and in the US what they wanted to happen to those media companies that failed to take down misinformation about vaccines a majority of people — in every demographic, in every psycho-graphic of every political leaning, in both the US (which has got the 1st Amendment and Section 230) and the UK — said yes to boycotts by other companies; yes, to fines by the state; and yes, to -we were surprised by this- criminal charges against executives who failed to exert a statutory duty of care. The public have already come to a conclusion. The public are much more capable of balancing these important fundamental rights of harm minimization and freedom of speech. The freedom of speech is not the freedom of rich. People should not have the right to pump misinformation into people’s households if that causes harm. In the case of corona-virus if you don’t constrain the misinformation, people will die and our societies will never recover from that. Do we want to let Facebook decide that we are never going back to normal? Because this is what is happening right now.
Q: How the average social media user can protect themselves from sophisticated disinformation campaigns or to simply be aware of the information that the algorithm promotes on that matter?
A: There’s a strong correlation between getting your news from social media and being vaccine hesitant, for example. Social media is not a good place to find information. There are tools that we can use to try and block those people who want to spread misinformation to us. There are organized people who are trying to spread misinformation and often there are willing dupes who are amplifying that misinformation. We’ve suggested with our “don’t spread the virus” scheme, which builds on the same logic as “don’t feed the trolls” that if you block people they can’t spread their (mis)information to you. We have actually found far right and Neo-Nazi playbooks, in which they explain how they operate: they say something controversial, they wait for other people to engage, and that then amplifies their narrative into millions of timelines. It is really simple and we keep falling for it day after day after day. The best thing that we can do is ignore stuff on social media that is not from a credible authority, to block people that are persistently spreading it- or spreading known misinformation- and then take a time out! Social media can really mess with your head. Having something come from someone that you know that is wrong, it triggers impulses in us. We are human beings. We want to be likable, we don’t want to upset people, we don’t want to disagree with someone we love and care about; it is really difficult to argue with a relative -for example- who is misinformed, because you don’t really want to get into it. Don’t expose yourself to it. It’s really unhealthy for you, for them and for society.
Q: What about de-platforming?
A: De-platforming works, it’s just that simple. If you reduce their audience, they’re incapable of spreading it to as many people, and this idea that their audience is going to follow them to another place isn’t empirically true. It is not true at all and that has been shown in counter-terrorism studies of how Al-Shabaab and ISIS, when they were de-platformed, had to spend huge amounts of effort reconstituting their networks -and never could- without the algorithmic amplification of YouTube and Twitter and everyone else. It’s something that we study in detail, so we watch the people that we have de-platformed and we see what’s happened to them. They are rendered tiny nubs after de-platforming. Why? Because no one’s really interested in what they have to say if they haven’t got an algorithm literally giving them the advantage. That’s the thing, there never was a level playing field. That whole idea of free speech was a lie on these platforms. The other side is given an amplification because they produce content which is deliberately designed to get us engaging with it and misinform. If the NHS says: “please wear a mask” no one goes in and writes back to them saying “Oh yeah, thanks so much”. If someone says something like don’t wear a mask, 1000 people will descend and say “no, that’s rubbish”, however, by engaging an advantage is given to misinformation over good information — algorithmically. It’s just that simple.
Q: What is the role of traditional media in digital platforms? Can one claim that they are the gatekeepers of information?
A: I think the traditional media is changing and it’s right that it does change, but the traditional media was never just about the gatekeepers who decide who goes on and who doesn’t. It was also more fundamentally about a value set, the journal, the revolution in journalists and journalistic ethics.
And when the printing press started, when the first newspapers came out, they were just as bad as the social media platforms are now. You think of the yellow press, the way that they based themselves on salacious gossip or on outright lies, in which they tried to shape the media and the information environment and that had to be revolutionized through a whole new social approach. New economies, new laws which made it more difficult for them to lie about people and ethical change within the companies themselves and understanding in society that there were different qualities of news, that there were quality news providers and bad news providers. That will take time but it will happen at the social media companies as well. We should be very clear that people that work for these companies now are working for unethical companies. They might have great cafes internally and they might have great spaces in which to hang out, but they work for unethical companies. Companies that profit from hate and misinformation. They will eventually fall by the wayside because I do believe that most of us are good people and eventually that business model based on sin will end.
Q: It is through our institutions and our values that have regulated the economy so far, that will set the frame for big techs too?
A: Yes, but only if we get to grips with it. This will only happen with concerted action. It takes awareness building, it takes encouragement, it takes the threat of consequences for nonconformity, it takes a whole of society’s response. We’re going to need new ways of understanding how these companies operate under public good.
Q: Organizations, civil society, politics and individuals, we all share the same responsibility?
A: It’s going to require a social response, but our societies have risen to those challenges before. These are not insuperable, nor are they entirely novel. They are challenges nonetheless, and when there is a challenge we need to stand up to it. Nevertheless, I think that we’re starting to see that and we are only 10 years into this revolution. If we think now that these social norms and values and changes that are happening in our society seem huge, there are only a few years’ worth of work to reshape it. A space in which we can make a healthier economy around digital communication will take time, but it’s not something that cannot be conquered. The next technological revolution will happen, so we need to rise up to this challenge now; there are bigger and bigger changes happening, which will present even greater problems for us.
You can find the website of the Center for Countering Digital Hate here
There two ongoing campaigns:
#StopHateforProfit campaign, a coalition of groups alongside the Colour of change, the ADL, Common Sense Media, and sleeping Giants which is trying to persuade advertisers not to advertise on social media companies that aren’t taking action against hate and misinformation.
#StopFundingFakeNews, which is about persuading advertisers not to let their adverts appear as a result of Google’s ad network on fake news sites that push hate and misinformation and pretend to be real news sites.
