Fake News and Trust: Why We Should Care if Fake News Is Actually Fake
Between political campaigns and the infodemic that accompanied the Covid-19 pandemic, we have become more and more alert about the presence of fake news and disinformation in our everyday lives. Speculations of truthfulness of the information we consume have never been more prominent as we increasingly question if there is a manipulative hand behind a source or if someone has a motive for sharing data.
Learn a Term: Infodemic (noun)
An infodemic is too much information, including false or misleading information, in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak. It causes confusion and risk-taking behaviours that can harm health. It also leads to mistrust in health authorities and undermines the public health response.
— World Health Organization (WHO)
What Will Fake News Exposure Cost Us?
The impact of fake news is something that has been intensively studied by scholars in recent years. Generated by biased news outlets, bots, or individuals with the intent to influence others, pieces of fake news can take over social media in a short amount of time, planting anxiety, anger, and fear into readers’ minds. Because fake news is often produced with a specific target or outcome in mind, once the information is fabricated, such disinformation can be shared quickly through people with similar interests and opinions because it is agreeable and suited to their known profiles (including their belief systems and behaviours).
As we share and are exposed to information that fuels similar ideologies over and over, it is easy for those opinions and beliefs to skew towards a few extremes and become more and more polarized.
Though the information in fake news may not be accurate, it can still be effective for malicious intent — for example, fake news has proven to be a potent tool to degrade a political opponent in a short period of time. Knowing this, politicians and marketers oftentimes use disinformation against their opponents. Even though readers might recognize that some of the information they were exposed to is false, they might still be willing to pass the piece of fake news onward from time to time for other reasons, thus continuing the cycle unintentionally.
Fake news can also be used to simply create confusion. For example, fake news may sometimes only shake a belief a reader holds or introduce (unfounded) doubts about a subject, which is often enough to reach the intended malicious goal of weakening the support of their previous point of view or changing their stance towards a fact they previously disagreed with.
It is hard to penalise the spread of misinformation or fake news, as it can oftentimes be untraceable and perpetuated with a mix of neutral or good intentions. Even when the original source post has been flagged or taken down, a screenshot, word of mouth, and a picture or even a re-upload of the same content can restart the spread of the information once again. With current social media platforms commonly being purposefully designed as echo chambers for users, it is highly likely that the same sort of information, false or true, will be encountered by similar demographics over and over again.
Creating, consuming, and sharing disinformation thus come together and become a vicious cycle fuelled by beliefs and biases versus trust. From this endless cycle comes the prevalence of fake news in our everyday life and our habit of staying vigilant as we go online, constantly on the lookout for false or biased content, since every piece of information we encounter can now be weaponized.
Can Correcting Fake News Reduce Polarization?
There are several skills that have proven helpful in combatting polarization cause by fake news, as questioning the authenticity of the source material has become almost instinct for the average person:
- Recognizing fake or false information;
- Searching for sources and evaluating their trustworthiness; and
- Distinguishing content generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) from those made by humans.
Nevertheless, even the most cautious and rational user can sometimes fall for a fabricated piece of disinformation. Debunking, provided by a trustworthy source and distributed by online platforms, can also help stop the spread and propagation of disinformation. It is now almost a common practice for platforms to include tags indicating specific warnings for the users to proceed with engagement at their own discretion. On social platforms such as Weibo, the site also provide timelines that thread the development of current events or online dispute together, helping the user to get a greater picture of the situation no matter from what point of view they entered the discussion initially.
Recognizing the possible impact of fake news and disinformation, organizations such as the World Health Organization have also published studies, stories and articles, and offer organized events that help everyday people learn about disinformation, using AI and personnel training to understand health disinformation specifically during the pandemic.
But what happens next? What happens after a piece of information is labeled false? The power of correction still has its limitations. Research shows that even when a correction to a wrongful statement is provided, since the correction can contain information that goes against the individual’s established beliefs there is no guarantee that the correct information will reach the intended audience. Even though there is always the possibility for a piece of disinformation to be corrected, it might not always be the case that the correction is accepted.
With increased polarization, it’s also easier for people to confuse disagreeing with statements with those statements being fake or false.
Everyone can be an author of a correction, just as everyone can be an author of a piece of fake news. Caring whether a piece of disinformation is actually false is as important as knowing what is right.
Therefore, when considering a correction or debunking of a piece of fake news, it is still important to look at the correction with a critical eye, since discrediting a piece of work without evidence can also have detrimental effects on the creator, just like exposing the falsehood of a piece of disinformation when it is well-deserved.
Ultimately, while we should be critical of the information we consume, it is also important to keep an open mind and leave room for people to disagree with us. The fight against fake news is fundamentally a combat against propaganda and the assimilation of diverse voices. If we lose the willingness and ability to hear from different perspectives, we trap ourselves in a loop of confirmation bias while trying to get out from one in the first place. By looking at events through different lenses, we can work towards reducing polarization and make our online environment less toxic than it currently is.
References:
Ribeiro, M. et al. (2017) ``everything I disagree with is #fakenews’’: Correlating Political Polarization and Spread of Misinformation. Available at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.05924.pdf (Accessed: 25 May 2023).
Hameleers, M. et al. (2019) Misinformation and polarization in a high-choice media environment: how effective are political fact-checkers? Sage journals. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0093650218819671 (Accessed: 25 May 2023).
Osmundsen, M. et al. (2021) Partisan polarization is the primary psychological motivation behind political fake news sharing on Twitter: American political science review, Cambridge Core. Available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/abs/partisan-polarization-is-the-primary-psychological-motivation-behind-political-fake-news-sharing-on-twitter/3F7D2098CD87AE5501F7AD4A7FA83602 (Accessed: 25 May 2023).
Spohr, D. (2017) Fake news and ideological polarization: Filter bubbles and selective exposure on social media, Kudos. Available at: https://www.growkudos.com/publications/10.1177%252F0266382117722446/reader (Accessed: 25 May 2023).
Tucker, J.A. et al. (2018) Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: A review of the scientific literature, SSRN. Available at: https://deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=135126090088118009108085025089016100116047065081011094098124009099126064077094004112035055107107098031041021098064030064121031061036008039068120113097017096102066038003081119079024105117030103011116119083110104102093012025102090115122008100075089009&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE (Accessed: 25 May 2023).
Barthel, M. (2016) Many Americans believe fake news is sowing confusion, Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2016/12/15/many-americans-believe-fake-news-is-sowing-confusion/ (Accessed: 11 June 2023).
Infodemic (no date) World Health Organization. Available at: https://www.who.int/health-topics/infodemic#tab=tab_1 (Accessed: 25 June 2023).
