Fighting Disinformation Online
By Allison Frazer
Puzzle pieces that spell out ‘disinformation,’ with ‘dis’ unconnected on red pieces and ‘information’ connected on white pieces.
Disinformation vs. misinformation
The American Psychological Association (APA) defines misinformation as “false of inaccurate information - getting the facts wrong.” Misinformation is very common. Sometimes, words can get mixed up and change something’s original meaning, inadvertently skewing the definition. Being misinformed can happen to anyone, and can be fixed with a quick Google search. Disinformation, however, is a bit trickier. Defined as “false information which is deliberately intended to mislead - intentionally misstating the facts” by the APA, the root of disinformation can come from malicious intentions.
This video from the Pan American Development Foundation outlines what disinformation is, the many forms it can come it, and, most importantly, how to protect yourself.
How to fight disinformation
With the spread of disinformation becoming more rampant, it is imperative that social media users have ways to identify and combat disinformation online.
Media Literacy Education
Media literacy is the ability to derive meaning from media that does not explicitly state their purpose. Media literacy can enable social media users to identify a posts purpose, intended audience, and outcomes without needing external clarification. Being able to see beyond a post and into the larger intentions of it can help dismantle the harmful effects of disinformation. In “Countering Disinformation Effectively,” the authors identify that while pedagogical approaches to teaching media literacy may differ, the “common goals include instilling knowledge of the media industry and journalistic practices, awareness of media manipulation and disinformation techniques, and familiarity with the internet and digital technologies.”
Providing social media users with the tools to recognize and dismantle disinformation will relieve some pressure from platform managers to fact-check every post and provide peace of mind for users worried about false claims.
Fact-Checking
With the ability to post anything, fact-checking has become one of the leading ways to debunk false claims and identify disinformation. Fact-checking is usually run by programs created to spot fake news or through exterior outlets. While fact-checking is popular and necessary in news outlets, social media sites have more posts each minute, making it difficult to prove each post’s validity. This flaw in social media can be easily taken advantage of, allowing disinformation to spread quickly. To fact-check every post on a platform is nearly impossible, and users can believe false claims that align with their beliefs, called confirmation bias. To avoid users doubling-down on their beliefs after a fact-check, called the ‘backfire effect,’ it was discovered that “the precise wording of fact-checks matters, with more straightforward refutations being more effective than nuanced explanations.”
Social media users do not want to feel dumb. Fact-checking with overly scientific or wordy explanations can make users double-down on their prior beliefs out of spite or insecurity. To guide users to accurate information, fact-check wording must be accessible and comprehendible.
Fact-checking outlets are not as popular as one may think. The number of outlets has increased steadily since 2015, as shown in the bar graph below, but there are only about 400 outlets for the billions of users across numerous platforms globally. This is evidence of the improbability of catching every false claim posted on social media. However, having 400 fact-checking outlets is still better than having no outlets working to fight disinformation.
Number of Fact-Checking Outlets Globally, 2015-2023 bar graph that increases from 150 fact checkers in 2015 to about 415 in 2023, the highest year being in 2022 with 425 active fact checkers.
Social Media Content Labels
Following fact-checking, social media can institute systems that allow other users than the original poster to label content to add further context. Words and stories can easily be taken out of context and skewed to spread disinformation, so through providing the full story and context to a post making a false claim, it allows other users that come across the post to form their own opinion of the situation. In the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report, it was found that on social media “large, assertive, and disruptive labels are the most effective, while cautious and generic labels often do not work.” Through providing users the ability to decide for themselves what is true, with labels that nudge them in the direction of the facts, they are more likely to decline disinformation because they don’t feel like they are uneducated for not knowing the context beforehand.
Why should social media users learn how to spot disinformation?
Lack of auto fact-checking programs
Social media sites are not the same as reputable news sources. News outlets have a system in place where all news stories are fact-checked and proven to be accurate before being released to the public. Most social media do not have fact-checkers that work to ensure only true information is being posted. This means that any user can post anything: they could make up a rumor about a celebrity they do not like or post a fake review about a local restaurant that wasn’t open when they’d like them to be.
The social media platforms are not always going to do the legwork to prevent or prohibit disinformation. Meta, the conglomerate that owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, created a new fact-checking program that was aimed at disinformation in a test run. In a test of 457 posts, the program only identified 30 as disinformation, when all of the posts were false. When a reporter looked into the same posts as the program, it was found that “Meta labeled one or more of the posts advancing the narrative but left uncorrected dozens of other posts containing the same false claim with the same meaning.”
This failing of Meta’s fact-checking program without a human eye behind it shows that social media users need to be prepared to protect themselves from disinformation.
Emerging Generative Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly taking over the digital landscape, changing what it means to be a creative. Generative AI can write articles, create images and now even videos and replicate voices once fed a small sample. With Gen AI becoming more evolved, differentiating between human-made content and AI content has become more difficult. TechCrunch released an article poking fun at the moody teenage tone of OpenAI’s ‘creative writing.’ While the article is humorous in it’s critique of angsty high school emotions, it makes a point about the increasingly ‘human’ attributes of AI’s writing: “It’s convincingly human-like introspection — until you remember that AI can’t really touch, forget, taste, or grieve.”
Human-made art is at stake with the creation of Generative Artificial Intelligence. It can be seen as an easier alternative to spending hours creating something original, but it has the ability - and the likely future - to perfectly emulate human work. Without social media user’s ability to spot AI usage, real artist’s careers can be at stake.