When the artist Elizabeth Haidle posted this picture on her Instagram account a while back, I immediately messaged her to ask if I could use it in my presentations. (Happily, she said yes.) I had never seen a better representation of what my brain is doing when I’m reporting a story—or taking in any new information about a subject that engages my emotions.
More than three decades in journalism have trained me to insert a little distance between me and new information. As I investigate a topic, whether through reading, interviewing, or observing, I’m also investigating my own reactions to what I’ve learned. What am I feeling? Why am I feeling that way? Why am I eager to believe or disbelieve this particular writer or speaker or researcher? What statements, statistics, or sources arouse my suspicions? How can I independently verify what I’m hearing? What sources do I trust and why? What lies outside the frame of this narrative? What am I not seeing?
These longstanding habits have served me well, but they are not foolproof, particularly in this moment, which I would call Peak Disinformation if I could only be confident that we are, in fact, at the peak. (Alas, I fear we have a long way to go before we hit the summit.)
Eight factors are making it harder and harder to distinguish fact from fiction and control for confirmation bias:
Overwhelm and Overload: We are bombarded with so much information, from so many sources, that it’s increasingly difficult to verify the origins of anything.
The Illusory Truth Effect: In the torrent of information, some statements are repeated, reposted, and reformatted over and over. The number of times you hear something is not a reliable predictor of its veracity, but it does have the effect of making something feel more true.
Social Allegiance: All of us want to be in alignment with our communities, and so if most of the people we know believe something, it becomes increasingly difficult to hang onto our own point of view. In fact, political allegiances are stronger than allegiances to other social identifiers like race, religion, gender, and ethnicity.
Misinformation and Disinformation: Sinister forces, including corporations, governments, and extremists, are deliberately flooding our information channels with misleading and deceptive information.
Technology: Artificial Intelligence has been unleashed on the world with few controls or guard rails. Its ability to mimic human speech, behavior, and thought makes it the most powerful source of false information we’ve ever encountered. The dangers are vast and include both deliberately false information like deep fakes and inadvertently false information, known in the tech world as “hallucinations,” in which the AI simply invents facts of its own.
Lack of Reliable Sourcing: I’m biased toward legacy media (particularly newspapers and magazines) because my work in those ecosystems has shown me firsthand how much care goes into verification and fact-checking. That doesn’t mean that those information sources should be blindly accepted — not at all! — but that they are, in the aggregate, more reliable than your average blogger, influencer, or podcaster. But traditional newspapers are disappearing and being replaced by a variety of operations that call themselves “news” while failing to adhere to even the most basic principles of fairness and accuracy. And of course traditional news organization still exhibit plenty of bias and sloppiness, particularly when it comes to breaking stories where the incentive to choose speed over accuracy overwhelms the usual checks and balances.
Persecution of Reporters: The conditions for reporters around the world, particularly in war zones and under totalitarian regimes, are as dangerous as they’ve ever been. There are many places (think Iran, Russia and Gaza) where it is almost impossible for reporters to operate independently without risking their lives and the lives of their families.
The Power of Big Tech: Much of the information we receive is now funneled through a few privately-held platforms. Protected from many consequences of their actions (or inactions) by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and sequestering the information about how their operations contribute to mis- and disinformation in a proprietary black box, Big Tech is almost completely unaccountable for its role in the spread of false information. That’s only gotten worse in recent years, with tech giants like Elon Musk’s X now refusing to share data with academic researchers trying to understand how disinformation spreads and what works to combat it.
Over the next few weeks, I will be delving a little deeper into the mechanics of disinformation and the ways in which we are all vulnerable to it, plus what we can do to protect ourselves.
In the meantime, here are a few stories that touch on the problem of How To Think About Information, Propaganda and Free Speech.
In the ‘big tent’ of free speech, can you be too open-minded? (The Conversation)
This think piece delves into the question of whether—and how --to engage with arguments and points of view that appall or repulse you.
Laney College journalists exposed school officials’ mistakes. The story kept getting more complicated (Oaklandside)
This long read about student reporters investigating a community college security contract takes place in my home town and involves issues I remember all too well from my ten years as a local reporter here. What happens when the facts are at odds with well-meaning intentions and the fraught politics of systemic racism?
Among the A.I. Doomsayers: Some people think machine intelligence will transform humanity for the better. Others fear it may destroy us. Who will decide our fate? (The New Yorker)
Two groups of people looking at the same set of facts in very different ways. Both of them are experts in the field.
Not All Propaganda is Art (Theory of Everything Podcast)
How three well-known Cold War-era writers — Dwight Macdonald, Kenneth Tynan, and Richard Wright —ended up working with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a lavishly funded anti-Communist propaganda outfit secretly set up by the C.I.A.
With a sigh,
Dashka
I love your ongoing analysis, Dashka! Please keep helping us converse about the concerns of today. Thank you.