Beyond Fake News

Finding the Truth in a World of Misinformation

Justin P. McBrayer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000222555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The world is swimming in misinformation. Conflicting messages bombard us every day with news on everything from politics and world events to investments and alternative health. The daily paper, nightly news, websites, and social media each compete for our attention and each often insist on a different version of the facts. Inevitably, we have questions:

• Who is telling the truth?
• How would we know?
• How did we get here?
• What can we do?

Beyond Fake News answers these and other queries. It offers a technological and market-based explanation for how our informational environment became so polluted. It shows how purveyors of news often have incentives to mislead us, and how consumers of information often have incentives to be misled. And it chronicles how, as technology improves and the regulatory burdens drop, our information-scape becomes ever more littered with misinformation. Beyond Fake News argues that even when we really want the truth, our minds are built in such a way so as to be incapable of grasping many facts, and blind spots mar our view of the world. But we can do better, both as individuals and as a society. As individuals, we can improve the accuracy of our understanding of the world by knowing who to trust and recognizing our limitations. And as a society, we can take important steps to reduce the quantity and effects of misinformation.

Part I

The Misinformation Market

1
Informational Litter

You wouldn’t go to the doctor unless you thought something was wrong. Similarly, you wouldn’t bother reading a book about how to make your view of the world more accurate unless you had a reason to think that there was a problem. This first part of the book sketches the problem of fake news by outlining the scope of misinformation that we regularly face and the incentives that drive both the supply and consumption sides of the misinformation market.

The comparison between a landscape and an information-scape is apt. In a landscape, your view of the natural world and its beauty can be marred by litter, pollution, or filters. Sometimes the litter is the result of bad actors, and sometimes it’s the result of negligent fellow citizens. It’s no different in an information-scape. Your view of the truth and its relevance can be marred by the litter of misinformation or the filters you use to sort incoming information. Sometimes this misinformation is the result of bad intentions (as in the case of propaganda), and sometimes it’s the result of negligence (like homemade coronavirus cures posted on Facebook).

The goal of this chapter is to explain just how littered our informational environment is and why it’s worse now than it has been in recent years. Figuring this out doesn’t require us to craft some kind of special definition of “fake news.” On the face of it, something counts as fake news if it’s misleading and yet news.

Some people define fake news more narrowly. For example, some mainstream journalists define fake news as deliberately constructed lies that are intended to mislead the public.¹ Some people call this “disinformation,” and it’s fine to focus on that given recent political history. But for our purposes, this is a distinction without a difference. We don’t want our view of the world distorted whether it’s done on purpose or not. So, we can rely on a much more general understanding of fake news. While many of the examples in this book will focus on the recent surges of political disinformation from political parties, foreign governments, and biased news outlets, the big picture is about so much more.

Fake news is misleading information (mis-information).^a Intentionally false stories are certainly included in the category of misinformation, but there are lots of ways to deceive people that don’t requires saying what’s out-and-out false. That’s why spin doctors make such a good living.

a Researchers often have reasons to draw more fine-grained distinctions among the body of fake news. The most useful set of fine-grained categories I’ve seen is from Wardle, “Fake News.” She draws many different distinctions, but the following, three-fold distinction is most helpful:

• Misinformation is a false message but one that was not intended to deceive the audience, either because it was presented as satire or else because the mistake was unintentional.
• Disinformation includes any false claims that were fabricated with the intent to deceive an audience.
• Malinformation includes true claims that are used in an attempt to harm.
  On this way of categorizing things, an honest mistake by a local reporter is misinformation, a political ad claiming that Bush planned 9/11 is disinformation, and revenge porn is malinformation.

For example, one way to mislead someone without falsehoods is to report some true things, but not the whole truth. This is called cherry-picking. The risk of cherry-picking explains why courts require people to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Any given story includes literally hundreds of different facts, and a news source can report on a mere handful. Thus, one easy way to mislead readers is to select just the part of the truth that is useful for your interests or your readership and leave it at that. This is how one and the same event can be reported in very different ways on MSNBC and Fox News even while the anchors on both sides speak nothing but the truth.

Here’s an example of cherry picking. Consider the federal tax cuts initiated by President George Bush.² Surprisingly, both of the following things are true:

• The 10% of Americans with the highest incomes received over 50% of the tax relief.
• The Bush tax cuts made the overall system more progressive by requiring the wealthy to pay a higher percentage of their income relative to the less wealthy.

How could those both be true? Because you can lower the overall rate while adjusting how much each income bracket within the reduced total will pay. And that’s exactly what the tax cut did. Reliably, conservative news outlets promoted the second fact more than liberal outlets, and liberal outlets promoted the first fact more often—and sometimes to the complete exclusion—of the second fact. That’s cherry-picking.

Fake news also includes cases in which the whole truth is presented but framed in biased or unfair ways. As we’ll see how you frame an issue affects how others understand it. For example, reporting that the economy held steady in the second quarter is different than reporting that the economy failed to grow in the second quarter. One of the most widely shared stories on immigration in 2015 was a Breitbart story about a Motor Voter Act in California with the title “Jerry Brown Signs Bill Allowing Illegal Immigrants to Vote.”³ Every sentence of the story was true, but the probability that even a single illegal immigrant would be given the right to vote was so small that the title was an inaccurate way to frame the story. (This article and similar ones in 2018 were debunked by fact checkers on both the right and the left.)⁴

So, a news source can be misleading even if it reports the whole truth. Your view of the world can be manipulated by others even when they don’t say what’s out-and-out false. Fake news should be understood to include misinformation of all sorts, intentional or not. It should include stories that are false even if they were not propagated as such. Some false stories are circulated by people who genuinely believe them. If you care about having an accurate view of the world, then you should be concerned about all of these cases.

The simple fact is that we are being bombarded by fake news of all sorts every day. And while this assault has increased with the rise of electronic media, as it turns out, our informational environment was never pristine.

Fountains of Misinformation

For those tempted to think that fake news and its ilk are a newfound phenomenon, you had better sit down. Since the dawn of animal life, we have sought to deceive one another in certain circumstances. Delicious butterflies take on the color of a poisonous and foul-tasting species. Cuttlefish males disguise themselves as females to boost their odds of copulation. Having a language only makes it easier to deceive others. Sometimes it’s good for me that you believe the wrong thing, and where there is a motive, there is a temptation.

But liars aren’t the only problem we face. Sometimes this misinformation is well-intentioned: other agents are themselves misinformed, and they pass that misinformation along to those around them. That means we are often on the receiving end of misinformation from both the liars and the deluded. In either case, accepting such misinformation leaves us with mistaken beliefs about our world and the people in it.

Finally, sometimes we are our own worst friend. That’s because in at least some cases, the misinformation starts with us. We sometimes believe things that don’t make any sense. In particular, we tend to believe things we like, things that make us feel better about ourselves, and things that seem common or typical (more about this in Chapter 4). When your gut tells you something or when you arrive at a particular view about the world, you should do some verifying of the facts on the ground before trusting yourself to have gotten it right.

The short of it is that there are many sources of misinformation, and no shortage of bad actors who will manipulate us for their own ends. Here are a few illustrations to give this overall sketch of the landscape some needed color.

Start at the level of the individual. There is good evidence that you lie every day.⁵ (If you just thought to yourself, “I don’t lie that much,” then thank you for making the point. Self-deception is a kind of lying, too.) In fact, one recent study showed that most participants in the study lied an average of two or three times during a 10-minute conversation with another participant.⁶ While we shouldn’t put too much stock in a single study of this sort, even if the number of lies is off by an order of magnitude, it’s still clear that we lie an awful lot.

We are also deceptive without actually lying. Recently, various influencers on social media have been caught faking their own sponsorships in order to trick their followers into thinking that they were more important and popular than they actually are.⁷ And while paid advertisements are required to be disclosed, there are no rules against faking a paid advertisement when you were not actually paid.

But it’s not just that we lie to one another. We also genuinely believe some crazy stuff ourselves, and we try to get others to join in. This isn’t a problem of malicious individuals trying to get you to believe something that they don’t. It’s a problem of ignorant individuals who are trying their best to enlighten you.

You probably know about some of the strange things people from bygone eras believed. For example, if you were a European peasant during the Middle Ages, you probably thought that witches could cast spells on people, that cutting someone open to let them bleed would cure a host of illnesses, and that sperm had little tiny humans inside of them.

However, you don’t have to go medieval to end up with strange beliefs. In 1975, over 60% of the American public thought that the assassination of MLK was part of a huge government-orchestrated conspiracy, and in 1991, 31% of Americans thought that FDR knew about the impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor but did nothing.⁸ There is no good evidence for either claim.

Contemporary people have plenty of crazy beliefs, too. How can I convince you of that? The problem, of course, is that even if some of our current beliefs about the world really are problematic, it’s not easy for us to see that. After all, we’re the ones who believe them. If you could go back in time and tell a medieval peasant that sperm don’t have tiny humans in them, he likely wouldn’t believe you, either.

Here’s what I can do. I’ll provide a list of some problematic things that many current people believe. If you’re an average American, you probably believe at least something on this list. But you almost certainly don’t believe everything on this list. Many of these claims will strike you as just totally bizarre. And that’s enough to make my point that, even by your own lights, we live in an environment in which a lot of individuals believe crazy stuff. Here are some whoppers that have been documented in recent surveys:

• Most Americans think that there was a cover-up by the government of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and that more than one shooter was involved in the assassination.⁹
• million Americans think alien UFOs have visited earth.¹⁰
• Many people think that the contrail lines left in the sky after airplanes pass over are actually chemtrails from government agents trying to manipulate everything from the weather to mind control.¹¹
• One-third of Americans believe that vaccines can cause autism in children.¹²
• 42% of Americans think that 9/11 was an “inside job,” and that the US government covered up evidence in the official investigation.¹³
• One-third of people on earth today either deny that the Holocaust occurred or think that it has been greatly exaggerated.¹⁴
• Many people think that sugar and food coloring make children hyperactive.¹⁵

If none of these examples convince you that humans can be genuinely but obviously confused, I encourage you to peruse the website for the Flat Earth Society.¹⁶ I have no idea how many members the society has or how many people share its views, but the fact that there is anyone who would endorse this strange concatenation of pseudo-science and conspiracy theory should be enough to alert you to the fact that individual humans can be spectacularly wrong on their own without the help of Russian trolls.

But, of course, individuals aren’t the only pushers of information in the world. There are groups of humans who coordinate efforts in a way that provides them with outsized influence on our informational environment. The most obvious examples of these are corporations and governments. Let’s take each one in turn.

How Corporations Manipulate the Truth

Companies have lied to consumers, stockholders, and government officials from day one. The huge ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Endorsements
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I The Misinformation Market
• PART II Why We Fall for Misinformation
• PART III How We Can Do Better
• Notes
• Annotated Bibliography
• Works Cited
• Index