We Get the News We Demand

A Bleak Picture The viral transmission of false information began disrupting civil societies around the world several years before we noticed it here in the U.S. Social media platforms in particular have been manipulated in ways that interfere with elections, fuel conspiracy theories that deepen ethnic and sectarian divisions, and generally erode the ability of communities to have rational, fact-based discussions on topics of public interest. The struggle to deal with misinformation has spawned a cottage industry of analysis and advice. Hardly a day goes by without some think piece promising to explain how we got to this crisis of confidence in facts, and often promising ways to ameliorate its effects. Some of the earlier studies, particularly efforts like one coauthored by Claire Wardle at First Draft Media, have added a great deal to our understanding of the challenge’s scope and complexity. Her 2017 report for the Council of Europe should be the starting point for all discussions of this issue. But Wardle’s report is the exception, not the rule. Unfortunately, if predictably, the vast majority of the solutions offered prove impractical or inadequate at best, and counterproductive at worst. A smorgasbord of initiatives funded by (mostly) well-meaning billionaires or undertaken by social media platforms and search engines (owned by mostly well-meaning billionaires) all presume that the problem lies with the quality of the information itself or the reputation of the information provider. That has led to efforts like: technology giants tweaking algorithms, partnering with fact-checkers, and shunning or stigmatizing irresponsible or malicious third-party distributors. nonprofits and news organizations providing faster fact-checking of statements by public figures as well as of social media postings. startups rating information providers based on their past performance in distributing information news organizations expanding efforts to explain to consumers how they know what they know and to make sure consumers’ voices are heard in newsrooms. Complicating the issue for media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google is their very business model. That model relies on the ability to identify the implicit prejudices and desires of consumers in order to keep them from wandering away to other sites and to help advertisers hypertarget messages. Fixing false news thus creates a quandary for these platforms: Substantially altering their algorithms so that they don’t play to our predispositions would be commercial suicide. Even hinting at such a change pushed Facebook shares down more than 20% last week. But even if these companies were able to change their stripes, and news outlets redoubled their efforts at transparency and community engagement, almost every study on the subject demonstrates that fact-checking and other efforts to alert consumers to the dangers of misinformation have minimal positive effects, or even have negative effects. And there is no evidence that, while important, transparency and community engagement have improved the public’s view of news organizations the least bit. An Old Problem and a New Problem That’s a bleak picture but not a novel one. The glut of analysis and advice tends to miss the fact that this has all happened before. A basic history lesson provides a fresh take on what’s happening now. More than 600 years ago, Johannes Gutenberg launched a communications revolution that altered power relationships around the world. After centuries of monopoly control over the power to publish (by the Roman Catholic Church, largely), the movable type printing press made publishing affordable and easy enough to allow new entrants into the market. Suddenly, multiple viewpoints could be spread to the public. The Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the American and French revolutions may not have occurred if the radical ideas of rabble-rousers like Martin Luther and Thomas Paine had not spread so far, so fast. So…virally. In retrospect we view those upheavals positively, but in their time they led to enormous disruption and death. Since most people were illiterate, printing presses produced more than just texts. Luther and his graphic designer, Lucas Cranach, inflamed opposition not only to the Catholic Church but also to the ruling elites, using memes that would be the envy of any 21st-century troll. When the German Peasants’ War erupted, Luther initially approved, but as the death and destruction multiplied — by some estimates hundreds of thousands of people were killed — he eventually condemned the uprising. In other words, communications revolutions beget social, cultural, and political upheavals. It’s not a special feature of the rise of the internet and social media. It’s a predictable outcome. One of the reasons we may have initially missed the magnitude of this latest upheaval is that it’s more distributed. Gutenberg’s disruption and radio’s and television’s smaller uprisings still largely left the power to publish in the hands of corporations, interest groups, governments, and wealthy individuals. It was no monopoly, but it was still the case that only a handful of people could proffer messages. The advent of the internet and mobile computing might have been another change not on the level of Gutenberg; Steve Jobs predicted as much 20 years ago. But he didn’t take into account the possibility of another ‘berg that would change society’s power equation: Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and the other social media platforms have transformed our culture at the Gutenberg scale. As with movable type, expanding publishing power to the masses creates many beneficial outcomes. For example, unarmed black men have been shot by police officers with impunity for decades without the widespread outrage it’s producing now. Smartphones and social media — plus organizations like WITNESS, which trains people to capture and publish these events — have been important tools in bringing the public’s attention to the tragedies. At the same time, those with intentions to disrupt the truth have gained access to easy, affordable publishing and have wreaked havoc on the consensus around what constitutes facts. This new era presents us with four serious challenges: The volume of information that floods over us each day makes it difficult to sort out the reliable from the fabricated. New technologies to create and share information can mimic the look, feel, sound, and sense of an authoritative source and then spread that credible-looking misinformation virally. The conflict between speed and accuracy is intensifying. We all want information as quickly as possible, but faster access increases the chances that the information will be wrong. We prefer information that supports our beliefs. With the internet and social media, it’s much easier to select only information that reinforces our existing ideas and filter out any challenges to them. A New Solution That’s an Old Solution Most of the ink and pixels spilled on extolling various “answers” to the false news dilemma have focused on the supply side, the publishers. But as we’ve seen, the supply side is massive and unwieldy. Better answers to this challenge can be found on the demand, or consumer, side. Just as Gutenberg’s printing press made the ability to read and write an important element of citizenship, we now need a new literacy for the 21st century. Yes, the answer lies in learning — hardly a vanguard idea, but possibly the most effective one. Sam Wineburg, director of the Stanford History Education Group, says that means we must learn to read “laterally” — to use the power of the web to verify the web, to interrogate a site or story by checking its claims elsewhere. Overall, citizens must learn to: interrogate information instead of simply consuming it verify information before sharing it reject rank and popularity as a proxy for reliability understand that the sender of information is often not its source acknowledge the implicit prejudices we all carry This is not a skill set that can be developed in an afternoon training session. In fact, that’s been tried. A recent project in Ukraine used a 200-page manual to train 450 people to lead half-day discussion sessions with a total of 15,000 citizens. In a follow-up survey, participants in a test of misinformation analysis got about 64% of their answers correct, while the control group scored just under 57%. That’s not much improvement. Worse, the participants were no better than the control group at analyzing a news story. In other words, in spite of thousands of hours of research by very smart people and hundreds of thousands of dollars being invested, the armor around misinformation remained undented. Education on the demand side is an essential part of the answer, but it requires a large-scale, long-term educational shift. “News Literacy,” a curriculum developed at Stony Brook University in New York over the past decade, is designed to help students develop critical thinking skills in order to judge the reliability and credibility of information, whether it comes via print, television, the internet, or social media. Thus far more than 10,000 undergraduates have taken “News Literacy,” and more than 30 U.S. universities have adopted or adapted all or part of the course. In the past five years universities in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Australia, Vietnam, Israel, Russia, Poland, and Myanmar have partnered with Stony Brook to develop curricula appropriate for their students. There’s even an abridged version on Coursera. Independent studies have demonstrated that students who take the Stony Brook course show significantly higher levels of news media literacy, greater knowledge of current events, and a higher motivation to consume news, and the effects don’t diminish with time. But even teaching university freshmen will not solve the problem we face. Learning about false news must start in middle and high schools, in a comprehensive, nationwide effort. Pilot programs have begun in New York City middle schools, as well as in high schools in Illinois and Long Island. In addition, the News Literacy Project has been working for more than a decade to introduce these concepts in high schools through visits by journalists. These experiments are a good first step, but real progress will require public and philanthropic funding for pilot projects that can serve as models, scalable teacher training programs, and active support by state and local education officials. A new generation of news-literate citizens who demand high-quality information will shape the future of journalism. Just as it is said that in a democracy citizens get the government they deserve, in the 21st century newly empowered consumers will get the information they demand. The Big Idea

We Get the News We Demand

A Bleak Picture

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