How We All Can Fight Misinformation

Polluted information online is a “wicked problem.” It cannot be solved by conventional processes, and efforts to address it often exacerbate it. Consider, for example, Facebook’s addition of a “disputed by fact-checkers” tag to articles that have been deemed false. Rather than change minds, the tag actually increased belief in the false claim for those audiences who were already inclined to believe it. We need to do better. The direct and indirect costs of information that is false, misleading, or manipulated are hard to quantify and tend to pertain to how polluted information is affecting democracies. Surprisingly, little discussion focuses on how it is influencing economies. Three recent major world events affected by misinformation — the Brexit vote and the elections of Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron — certainly have global economic consequences. After all, any campaign designed specifically to sow mistrust and confusion — and to sharpen existing sociocultural divisions using nationalistic, ethnic, racial, and religious tensions — surely reverberates across economies. In a recent report to the Council of Europe, my colleague Hossein Derakhshan and I made 35 recommendations for how to achieve wins in this important battle. Fixing algorithms, educating readers, and regulating platforms all are part of what we advise. But to get and stay ahead of attempts to pollute information, journalists, policy makers, and business leaders alike will have to do more than heed our suggestions — we’ll all need to run fast and work together. What We’re Fighting It’s helpful to start with some definitions, particularly as the term “fake news” has been stretched past its limits. What we’re really talking about — mis- and disinformation — does not always imitate news, and it isn’t always fabricated. False information that is shared mistakenly and without the intent to harm is best described as misinformation; alternatively, false information that is shared knowingly and with the intent to harm is called disinformation. The content can take many forms — from misleading text and characterizations in articles, to graphics and videos that use a branding image to establish legitimacy in a dishonest fashion. More broadly, disinformation can include campaigns to up- or downrate particular products online with fake reviews, paid signatures on petitions, efforts to game online search results, and sophisticated techniques to create false impressions about public opinion. Part of what makes misinformation a wicked problem is that many of the tools and methods for creating and distributing it are also widely used for non-nefarious purposes. The sophisticated techniques for collecting personal data used by the Russians and Cambridge Analytica in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election are nearly identical to those used by companies trying to reach new customers, NGOs seeking new supporters, and news outlets attempting to attract new audiences. For businesses, advertising through online agencies such as Google’s AdSense offers incredible reach, but that reach can include questionable sites. Ad-tech startup Storyzy has found more than 600 brands advertising on sites that promote conspiracy theories and other misinformation. Closed-messaging apps such as WhatsApp and WeChat help family and friends conveniently stay in touch, but they also make quick work of spreading dangerous rumors and lies that are difficult to debunk. All of this activity renders companies vulnerable. Even though a U.S. firm may have nothing in common with a Russian troll factory, efforts to secure Facebook and other platforms from disinformation campaigns limit how legitimate businesses can conduct outreach on social platforms. Google has permanently banned nearly 200 publishers of problematic content from subscribing to AdSense, thereby limiting companies’ advertising reach. And closed-messaging apps make it difficult to know when, or whether, your brand is being attacked and misused, as the BBC learned in the run-up to the 2017 Kenyan presidential election, when someone created a sophisticated hoax using the BBC’s logo and graphics and then circulated it on WhatsApp. The BBC ultimately had to issue a debunking video stating that it was not behind the false content. How We Work Together Brands have already played some role in pressuring platforms to remove misinformation, particularly when it has posed reputational risks to them. Companies including L’Oreal, Nike, and Walmart have removed their online advertisements after discovering they were appearing next to misinformation. These responses forced YouTube to take measures to ensure that automatically targeted ads aren’t featured alongside problematic content. Facebook has also blocked ads from pages that repeatedly share false news. Such steps can help stem the business of misinformation by limiting the advertising revenue that publishers of bad information earn. Technology companies also have to make difficult trade-offs. They are commercial entities that, to keep shareholders happy, aim to encourage users to stay on their platforms for as long as possible, thereby maximizing the number of ad exposures. Specifically, the companies tweak their algorithms to deliver more of what people have liked, shared, or commented on previously. When what users share is innocuous, the process works well — but when it comes to misinformation, the sharing allows false news to spread like wildfire. While it’s difficult to imagine technology companies making substantive changes to their algorithms, they can give users greater power to adjust and customize their own algorithms, thereby purposefully surfacing unexpected or discordant viewpoints that challenge users’ beliefs. These small changes would reduce the impact of filter bubbles, which allow misinformation to go unchecked when users see only content that aligns with their past activity. Finally, proactively seeking out and squashing misinformation quickly and effectively should be daily hygiene for all companies. A firm can, for instance, use social monitoring tools to skim the web for its logo and the names of key staff, so that the company is alerted when its brand and its people become targets of — and tools in — imposter campaigns. If you run a global company, you face the challenge of monitoring threats on a diverse array of platforms. In the Asia Pacific region, for example, almost every country has a different, favorite closed-messaging app. In China, it’s WeChat; in Myanmar, Viber; in Japan, Line; in Korea, KakaoTalk. Communicating with your workforce about misinformation is your best protection. Your people, who are likely to understand where disinformation spreads and what topics are most explosive, can be your first line of defense. If you are targeted, consider how you can fight back. Sometimes you need to take action, as the BBC did in the dustup around the Kenyan election. Don’t Give In. Don’t Give Up. We are witnessing an explosion in information pollution on a global scale, and the need for workable solutions is urgent. But I’m not naive enough to believe that we’ll ever get rid of false news. Academics, journalists, civil society, and policy makers tend to talk about misinformation as if we have a rational relationship with it. The truth is that the misinformation — while aided by platform parameters and new amplification tactics — reflects who we are and our feelings of superiority, anger, and fear. The most viral of polluted information plays on those emotions and helps users feel validated in their beliefs. Still, we must try. Technology companies should work closely with researchers; policy makers need to hear from fact-checkers; and we all have to be vigilant against false news. We’re never going to solve the problem, but we can take actions that will limit its damage. The Big Idea

How We All Can Fight Misinformation

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