Misinformed about Disinformation

By Christine Rosen

Thursday, January 19, 2023

 

Are misinformation and disinformation dooming democracy? Recent years have produced a flood of news stories saying so. But disinformation (intentionally misleading information such as propaganda) is nothing new; as scholar Thomas Rid argued in Active Measures, long before the internet, spy agencies across the world used such tactics to undermine enemy nations. So, too, with misinformation (false information that might be intended to deceive); the advertising industry arguably wouldn’t exist without it.

 

Concerns about disinformation and misinformation increased dramatically after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. With the mainstream media and Democratic officials clamoring about supposedly widespread Russian interference in the election (and suggesting that Trump would not have won without such disinformation campaigns), the public was served a steady stream of stories outlining this new threat to democracy.

 

Yet a series of studies about the impact of Russian interference has yielded very little evidence that such campaigns caused widespread damage to democracy. Most recently, a study in Nature Communications found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior” among Twitter users. Earlier studies, including a 2019 report in the journal Science, found similar results, including the fact that only 1 percent of Twitter users were exposed to nearly all (80 percent) of the Russian disinformation on the site and that almost all of these voters already identified as extremely partisan, conservative voters (and so would likely already have decided to vote for Trump).

 

Russian campaigns on larger platforms such as Facebook existed as well, of course, but were dwarfed by the much larger sums of money spent on political ads by both the Trump and the Hillary Clinton campaigns. As Joshua Tucker, one of the lead authors of the Nature Communications study, noted on Twitter, “our results hopefully provide an important corrective to the view that Russia’s foreign influence campaign on social media easily manipulated the attitudes & voting behavior of ordinary Americans.”

 

Even as the Russiagate investigations fizzled and studies showed that the Russian-disinformation bogeyman had not been as calamitous as initially claimed, the drumbeat about the dangers of misinformation continued. Today, as mainstream media outlets hire “disinformation reporters,” politicians and partisan activists have found it politically useful to continue making their claims about the threats that bad information poses to democracy. The demand for hyperbole about disinformation often exceeds the supply of actual disinformation. All too often, disinformation is a useful, all-purpose justification for traditional government overreach and the suppression of speech that undermines favored partisan narratives.

 

Consider the rhetoric of New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, when he announced recently that the state would be the first in the nation to require media-literacy training in K–12 schools. Studies have found mildly positive benefits from training of this kind, such as teaching students to identify misleading information in advertisements and online. One of the reasons the New Jersey bill had bipartisan support was that it emphasized that literacy training should focus on teaching students how to think about and identify credible sources of information, not what to think.

 

Yet Murphy chose to deploy over-the-top rhetoric in describing the law’s purpose: “Our democracy remains under sustained attack through the proliferation of disinformation that is eroding the role of truth in our political and civic discourse,” he claimed, adding, “It is our responsibility to ensure our nation’s future leaders are equipped with the tools necessary to identify fact from fiction.”

 

A Democratic co-sponsor of the bill, state senator Shirley Turner, was blunter: “This signing feels especially timely as we approach the two-year anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. It is incredibly important that our children are taught how to discern reliable sources and recognize false information.”

 

The mainstream media also explicitly linked the New Jersey media-literacy-training requirement to January 6. Reporting on the newly passed legislation, the Philadelphia Inquirer made sure to note, “The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump protesting the outcome of his defeat pushed information literacy to the forefront. Besides false claims that the presidential race and other elections around the country were stolen, misinformation spread during the pandemic about COVID-19 vaccines as well.” Even the president of New Jersey’s teachers’ union chimed in, telling reporters, “At a time when misinformation and disinformation are eroding the foundations of that democracy, it is imperative that students have the tools they need to determine what information they can trust.”

 

Or consider a bill (A.B. 2098) sponsored by Democrats in the California state assembly that recently became law. The bill is ostensibly about protecting patients from harmful health misinformation about Covid, but in practice it threatens physicians with the loss of their medical licenses for “dissemination of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.”

 

In California, the state now determines what physicians can tell patients (a violation of physicians’ speech rights) and declares it “professional misconduct” if one strays from that narrative — a narrative whose truth or falsehood is determined by a small, unelected state medical board, many of whom are political appointees. As California physician Tracy Beth Høeg argued at SFGate, “the way the bill is worded would lead physicians to self-silence unorthodox opinions or anything that may not be entirely aligned with ‘consensus,’ even though those opinions may eventually be proven correct.” She added, “Physicians who may be ahead of the curve or rapidly adopt new data into patient care may be unjustly punished,” even as we know that “science advances because of scientists and physicians who are brave and insightful enough to rightfully challenge orthodoxy.” Another California physician, Jay Bhattacharya, noted in the Free Press that the legislation turned doctors “into agents of state public health rather than advocates for their patients.”

 

Recall that until recently, making scientifically accurate claims about Covid (such as that the vaccine does not prevent transmission of the virus, or that vaccines slightly increased the risk of myocarditis for young men, or that long-term closure of schools was not necessary to stop the spread of Covid) would likely get you banned from major social-media platforms and branded a conspiracy theorist.

 

Ironically, the politicians in New Jersey and California so focused on misinformation and disinformation are correct that trust is the central issue at stake. The problem is that they’ve misdiagnosed the disease: The public doesn’t trust the institutions and elected officials passing these laws.

 

In a healthy political climate where trust in elected officials and institutions was higher, proposals for teaching schoolchildren about misinformation or encouraging doctors to combat bad health information would not be met with immediate skepticism. In Finland, for example, where trust in institutions remains high, schools offer a robust curriculum about misinformation, beginning in kindergarten.

 

But given Americans’ recent experience with the imposition of questionable school curricula and coordinated efforts by government and social-media platforms to suppress legitimate Covid information, such skepticism is warranted. It’s perhaps worth noting that the nation with the most zealous laws regulating misinformation is not one we should be eager to emulate: In China, it’s a criminal offense to spread misinformation or anything that the government decides undermines “economic and social order.” Other laws regulate the news sources that may be shared on Chinese social media, and in 2018 the government created an app to make it easier for people to report fellow citizens who are spreading misinformation.

 

Misinformation and disinformation pose real challenges in our digital age. But we should be wary of politicians who, like wolves in sheep’s clothing, exploit those concerns for partisan gain, as a means to censor speech they dislike and foment fears about the health of democracy.