In 2019, a rare and shocking event in the Malaysian peninsula town of Ketereh grabbed international headlines. Nearly 40 girls age 12 to 18 from a religious school had been screaming inconsolably, claiming to have seen a “face of pure evil,” complete with images of blood and gore.
Experts believe that the girls suffered what is known as a mass psychogenic illness, a psychological condition that results in physical symptoms and spreads socially – much like a virus.
Political spin is nothing new, and identifying reliable news and information can be hard to do during any presidency. But the return of Donald Trump to the White House has reignited debates over truth, accountability, and the role of media in a deeply divided America.
Misinformation is an umbrella term that covers all kinds of false and misleading content, and there is lots of it out there.
During Trump’s chaotic first presidency, the president himself promoted false claims about COVID-19, climate change, and the 2020 election.
The COVID-19 pandemic illuminated a vast landscape of misinformation about many topics, science, and health chief among them.
Since then, information overload continues unabated, and many people are rightfully confused by an onslaught of conflicting health information. Even expert advice is often contradictory.
On top of that, people sometimes deliberately distort research findings to promote a certain agenda. For example, trisodium phosphate is a common food additive in cakes and cookies that is used to improve texture and prevent spoilage, but wellness influencers exploit the fact that a similarly named substance is used in paint and cleaning products to suggest it’s dangerous to your health.
If you’ve ever heard of the press critic A.J. Liebling, it’s probably because you’ve heard this sentence of his: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
Liebling penned that for a 1960 dispatch from a publishers’ convention. The New Yorker correspondent had spent days watching newspaper publishers vigorously slap each others’ back over the purported strength of their industry.
Vaccinations have provided significant protection for the public against infectious diseases. However, there was a modest decrease in support in 2023 nationwide for vaccine requirements for children to attend public schools.
In addition, the presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading critic of childhood vaccination, has given him a prominent platform in which to amplify his views. This includes an extensive interview on the “Joe Rogan Experience,” a podcast with over 14 million subscribers. Notably, former President Donald Trump has said he is opposed to mandatory school COVID-19 vaccinations, and in a phone call Trump apparently wasn’t aware was being recorded, he appeared to endorse Kennedy’s views toward vaccines.
With less than six months to go until we elect the next U.S. president, voters must be savvy to spot disinformation. Artificial intelligence tools are making that task more difficult by allowing people to easily generate fake images and video intended to sway voters.
Today the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, originally filed as Missouri v. Biden. This case is emblematic of broader debates over the role of government in regulating online platforms and the protections afforded by the First Amendment in the context of speech online. In this case, the plaintiffs—the states of Missouri and Louisiana, as well as five social media users—alleged that governmental communication with social media platforms regarding concerns about COVID-19 misinformation and election interference amounted to coercion, violating the First Amendment.
After spending a few days in Washington, D.C. recently for an editors conference, I found myself with a few hours before my plane back to Nashville and decided to go to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The museum opened in early 1993; two decades later, it was still packed, and that’s a good thing. The phrases “never forget” and “what you do matters” are posted in multiple places around the museum, a reminder of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany’s regime and a caution to be alert for signs a government might be proceeding down a similar authoritarian path.
The impact of disinformation and misinformation has become impossible to ignore. Whether it is denial about climate change, conspiracy theories about elections, or misinformation about vaccines, the pervasiveness of social media has given “alternative facts” an influence previously not possible.
Bad information isn’t just a practical problem – it’s a philosophical one, too. For one thing, it’s about epistemology, the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with knowledge: how to discern truth, and what it means to “know” something, in the first place.
As the U.S. moves closer to the 2022 midterm elections, a sizable number of Americans express a lack of confidence in the accuracy of the vote count.
That distrust is built largely on the widespread – and false – assertion that Donald Trump was re-elected in the 2020 presidential election and that Joe Biden’s win was based on fraud. Despite the 2020 election being the most secure in American history, and the courts and U.S. Department of Justice uncovering no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome, consistently about 70% of Republican voters suspect election fraud, and overall mistrust in the neutrality of the election process remains high.
Rejection of science is a huge problem, with many people refusing to get vaccines and denying the existence of climate change.
Why are so many people anti-science? As experts on attitudes, persuasion, and how humans are impacted by scientific innovations, our recent research showed that there are four key reasons people reject scientific information.
At the end of 2020, it seemed hard to imagine a worse year for misinformation on social media given the intensity of the presidential election and the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. But 2021 proved up to the task, starting with the Jan. 6 insurrection and continuing with copious amounts of falsehoods and distortions about COVID-19 vaccines.
To get a sense of what 2022 could hold, we asked three researchers about the evolution of misinformation on social media.
Facebook has been quietly experimenting with reducing the amount of political content it puts in users’ news feeds. The move is a tacit acknowledgment that the way the company’s algorithms work can be a problem.
The heart of the matter is the distinction between provoking a response and providing content people want. Social media algorithms – the rules their computers follow in deciding the content that you see – rely heavily on people’s behavior to make these decisions. In particular, they watch for content that people respond to or “engage” with by liking, commenting, and sharing.
The problem of misinformation isn’t going away. Internet platforms like Facebook and Twitter have taken some steps to curb its spread and say they are working on doing more. But no method yet introduced has been completely successful at removing all misleading content from social media. The best defense, then, is self-defense.
Misleading or outright false information – broadly called “misinformation” – can come from websites pretending to be news outlets, political propaganda, or “pseudo-profound” reports that seem meaningful but are not. Disinformation is a type of misinformation that is deliberately generated to maliciously mislead people. Disinformation is intentionally shared, knowing it is false, but misinformation can be shared by people who don’t know it’s not true, especially because people often share links online without thinking.
As the turmoil of the Trump era drew to a close with an attack on the U.S. Capitol, planned on both mainstream and fringe digital platforms, tech companies found their policies governing extremism tested like never before.
Former President Trump’s efforts to discredit the 2020 presidential election put our democracy under tremendous strain, using technology as a cudgel. In so doing, he followed in the footsteps of authoritarians throughout the world who use technology, including social media platforms, as a weapon. These efforts were on full display before and during the presidential transition, when Trump and his allies weaponized social media to spread lies and conspiracy theories about the election being rigged. His baseless allegations of fraud culminated in an attack on the U.S. Capitol that left five people dead and 140 law enforcement officers injured. The supporters who coordinated the insurrection did so using a combination of mainstream social media platforms and fringe apps catering to and favored by the far right.
An endless flow of information is coming at us constantly: It might be an article a friend shared on Facebook with a sensational headline or wrong information about the spread of the coronavirus. It could even be a call from a relative wanting to talk about a political issue.
All this information may leave many of us feeling as though we have no energy to engage.
