Can you tell if a story is real or not ?
We went on the street to ask people about this video. What are their reactions ? What does this tell us about our relationship to social networks and information?
Social media, a.k.a. the new agora
For years now, we use Social Media to interact with other people. Through this Medium, we are sharing a variety of content. Because the Internet is a “public space”, many people can access these data.
Year after year the “shareability” of our data is soaring thanks to new IT technologies. Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Amazon, even Google search engine are places where we can share data. Most of us use one or more of these digital exchange places where latterly shaped a modern agora, the new gathering place and assembly where the social and political order of the polis is accommodated.
Keywords: autonomy and versatility.
And here is the tricky point of digital versatility.
This agora is a place with everyone having a say. Each one of us as an Internet user is a content creator. Traditional media should better watch out: every person has become the chief editor of its own newspaper, thus contributing to an inevitable data empowering.
The special nature of this place is also that everything moves faster within it. Now information easily becomes viral. Likes and shares are the totems of an era of immediacy. Like a virus, information spreads faster and faster and more unpredictably.
Between connection and mistrust.
The contributions of this new situation are undeniable. Never before has the principle of democracy been so effective. Borders can be crossed without difficulty, horizons are expanding.
Revolutions can arise from simple calls to action which until now would not have had a chance to be heard. Who can be Greta Thunberg without the echo of social networks ? These new digital communities act as cement for societies in desperate need of cohesion. We are more connected than ever to the rest of the world and to the citizens of countries in which we have never been before. We care about it. A whole new relationship to information has emerged.
But here is a great paradox: while freeing up speech and empowering everyone, digital seems to have increased mistrust. It is precisely because everyone knows that their neighbor can create and share the information they read, that the subject of fake news is now being pushed to the forefront.

The reign of (dis)information.
Yet, fake news did not wait for the birth of social networks to exist. “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it” wrote Jonathan Swift in 1710. The grape-vine is as old as the world itself.
But social networks give it unprecedented visibility. It is now common knowledge that behind posts, some publishers may try to bend reality and modify real facts, whether to further their causes, to appeal clicks or just … for fun.
The rise of technologies, and in particular artificial intelligence domaine, comes with fear, making people suspicious of information on social networks. How can you trust a content that can be so well forged, thanks to the deep fake or to the even more sophisticated means that will emerge?
Little room for frenzy.
It is rather reassuring to see that, despite the rapid pace at which the Internet has intruded into our lives, we are able to keep a cool head.
The people we met all seem to have a concern to cross-reference sources. They took a step back and reconsider the screen-based media they experience. Most of them want the younger generations to be aware of the key challenges of this digital revolution.
I asked Victor Laymand, Director of Studies at Make.org what he thought about these reactions:
“The reactions to this video are symptomatic of what some sociologists call the shift to the “post-truth era”. How the consumption of information has evolved developed the distribution of content that is not controlled by journalists or scientists. In a context where the competition for attention on the Internet is both increased and deregulated, the ability of citizens to find true information is blurred: emotion now counts more than truth. The citizens’ consultations show us the solutions to fight against the diffusion of fake news: better control by journalists, the possibility for citizens to better report a fake news but also that citizens have to be trained from an early age, in information verification. »
This fight has started. Organizations such as the AFP and the BBC join forces with the GAFAs to combat this nascent scourge and avoid the voluntary distribution of falsified content. Some AI will soon be introduced to identify and fight the algorithms used to fool Internet users. We know that we must control the machine we have created.

The half-conscious mass ?
But what if this apparent threat hides the real enemy? What if the person most likely to deceive us was precisely… us?
Albert Moukheiber, a French neuroscientist and author, explains that :
“10 to 15% of people who spread fake news do so voluntarily, knowing that reality is distorted. However “the rest, more than 80%, do so in good faith, without even recognizing it”.
The way our brains work, the biases associated with it, often make us unknowingly the main perpetrators of this misinformation. To avoid the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance (ie. the mental discomfort, psychological stress experienced by a person who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values) and ensure our internal coherence, it has developed mechanisms that can lead us into error.
These biases to which we are subject, and in particular confirmation biases — the tendency to seek information confirming our opinions — make us easy prey and new relays of misinformation.
Our brains are therefore very easy to influence, and this is reinforced by another factor: our taste for emotion. Social Media could be compared, as Michel P. Lynch says, to an « outrage factory ».
« We think we are sharing news stories in order to do one thing, like transfer knowledge, but much of the time aren’t really trying to do that at all (…). The stabilizing function of the practice of sharing content online is to express our emotions. »
The posts and content on these digital platforms strongly influence our emotions. There is a very binary aspect (“I like it”, “I don’t like it”), which sometimes leads us to relay information without even having read the article in question.
We therefore often have the primary responsability for the distribution of the fake news that we are so afraid of.
Conclusion: a civic duty
3.6 billion people are now active on Social media. These platforms have connected people to each other like never before. The voice of every internaut can reach as far as the other side of the world. But for democracy to thrive, everyone in the agora has to take responsibility for its words.
Yet, fake news and deepfakes seem to threaten this right. Individuals can’t rely on each other anymore.
But what if the rot had set in? Thriving on personal biased, Social network threatens our relations with one another, and though, our democracies may not recover from this. Being aware is the first step, acting will make the difference.
Please feel free to comment ! We’ll be happy to discuss it with you.
An article written by Héloïse Leduc, Jean Chd, Daniel Bartolo, Haiyu LU and Khaled Ghrissi. and special thanks to Victor Laymand from Make.org

