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We Can’t Combat Fake News If We Don’t Really Understand It
Social media is creating real problems for the world, but moral panics still far outweigh reality. That’s a recipe for policy disaster.
Even now, more than two years after the 2016 election, the debate over the influence of social media on our political system still relies largely on scary anecdotes (Twitter’s 50,000-plus impostor accounts are sowing chaos!) and speculation (YouTube is turning our younger generations into conspiracy theorists!). As a result, governments around the world are taking actions to counter misinformation campaigns, many of them based on flawed understandings or illiberal impulses. It’s time for this debate to get serious and start drawing on actual research and evidence.
A quick reality check first. Social media is creating real problems for the world, but moral panics rarely result in good policy. Take the debate over the factually dubious for-profit sites whose content was shared millions of times on Facebook in the period before the 2016 election. These sites certainly polluted the public debate, but contrary to some reports, there’s no evidence that they were responsible for Donald Trump’s victory.
In reality, research I co-authored finds that most people didn’t visit these sites at all in 2016. The same principle applies to Facebook political ads, which still have quite limited reach in 2018 relative to television ads; deepfake videos in politics, an idea where the media coverage radically outstrips the evidence of a crisis; and Russian hacking and information operations, a worrisome violation of our democratic sovereignty that was nonetheless relatively inconsequential to 2016’s electoral outcome.
These exaggerated fears about the influence of online information are reminiscent of past panics about the influence of television and radio. In reality, information from bots, Russian trolls, and fake news websites makes up a very small percentage of the information that we see online and is unlikely to change many people’s minds.
Given these realities, we should be cautious before empowering private companies like Facebook or governments to engage in unprecedented interventions into national political debate…
