Every other Tuesday, the team behind Civics 101 joins NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa to talk about how our democratic institutions actually work.
These days, breaking news is often followed by a tide of false information that spreads online before any clear details emerge. Civics 101 host Hannah McCarthy joins Julia to talk about false information, why it can be easy to mistake it as true, and how we can avoid it.
Transcript
There’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there. But first, what is misinformation and what is disinformation?
So you can think of it like this: Misinformation is a mistake. Disinformation is deception. Of course, that’s overly simplistic. So what I'm actually saying is that misinformation is the information that you encounter on social media, elsewhere online, watching television, talking to a friend, that you then promote or spread, thinking that it is true.
Disinformation is the actual lie. That's the start of it all. It is a false piece of information. It is purposefully misleading. It is designed to manipulate people.
What makes false information so prevalent and what makes it so effective?
It's super easy for a bad actor to throw a well-crafted lie online, promote it, sit back, watch it proliferate. And then the way that we interact with that information: scroll, pause, share, scroll, pause, share.
There was this really helpful, peer-reviewed 2021 study that suggested that the format is what contributes to a lot of misinformation spreading. And I bring this up, in part, because this study really importantly identified that, for the most part, people are not primarily motivated to share misinformation because of political partisanship. The majority of people who participated in this study said that they valued accuracy over spreading any old news that benefited their party or values. Sharing misinformation was more likely to be the result of a lie that was emotionally engaging.
And then you combine that with the instantaneous social feedback from social media that you get from sharing it, you know, that structure, those social cues, the tug on the heartstrings, that has a tendency to discourage people from reflecting on the accuracy of a statement.
Are there any laws that try to stop the spread of disinformation, especially on social media?
This is a little more complicated because we're talking about the First Amendment here. We're talking about free speech. Many, many states have false reporting statutes that have to do with emergencies and disasters. And the idea there is that if you spread a lie that actually endangers people, that is a crime. But whether a lie causes harm is a major consideration here, because First Amendment free speech concerns are subject to strict scrutiny.
I do just want to mention, at the very highest level, the Supreme Court recently dismissed a case that sought to restrict government officials from communicating with social media companies about their content moderation. And this case is really important, Julia, because it's going to make it harder in the future to bring a claim against the government's critique of information shared online.
How do we identify false information? What should we look for?
So there are many, many sources and organizations totally devoted to this. So FactCheck.org is one that comes to mind. The News Literacy Project. That's another major one.
I think the most powerful tool in identifying sources that are not trustworthy is identifying sources that are. [Such as] news sources that fact check. I will say bias is so difficult to avoid, and it is so human, that I'm not going to claim necessarily that you can find a source that does not contain some form of bias. But there are places that you can go to find actual facts.
And then the coexisting tool here, Julia, is skepticism. If you encounter a piece of information online, you should pause just for a moment before you share it. Do a simple online search. Determine whether this information has actually been reported on [or] confirmed. Determine whether there is meaningful truth behind it, because a lot of us share things because we think it'll be helpful without knowing that we're sharing something that isn't.
