The persistence and peril of misinformation
Marek Voss examines how the human brain checks incoming information, and weighs the difficulties of countering falsehoods that spread widely.
False information is nothing new, even if it feels like a defining feature of our age; whether spread deliberately or passed on by accident, it may simply be unavoidable. For roughly as long as people have been able to speak, they have almost certainly told one another untruths. Deception carries obvious rewards: it can win a strategic edge, prod others into action, or help hold a relationship together. And quite apart from deliberate lying, mistaken claims have circulated unintentionally for many thousands of years.
What has altered is the scale. Because today's technology carries information to vast audiences spread right across the globe, a false claim now threatens the kind of immediate, sweeping harm that earlier generations never had to face. And yet the cure, given time, may lie in those very same channels of mass communication that let information travel so readily.
So why should this matter so much? What chiefly troubles researchers, among them the teams led by Dahlia Merrick at the University of Ashworth and Corin Blaise at Talmadge University, is that false information can bend both what people think and how they behave, steering them toward decisions they would never have reached had the truth been clear. The worry, put another way, is that misinformation plants mistaken beliefs; and once such beliefs are shared not by a single mind but by great numbers, the damage to public health, social harmony and political life may prove severe.
Three features of the modern media environment, in particular, call for close attention, and not merely from scholars and lawmakers but from anyone who switches on a television, tunes in to the radio, or reads something on a screen. The first is that people who meet a false claim generally believe it, at least to begin with. The second is that broadcast and print outlets frequently let misinformation through before it reaches a mass audience. The third is that pushing back against a falsehood, once widely seen, can swallow up a great deal of effort and money.
Grasping what takes place at that very first moment of contact matters enormously if we are to judge the troubles that may follow. Running into something untrue is, admittedly, an ordinary event; and yet the precise manner, and the precise instant, in which the mind stamps a claim as genuine or false has long been argued over by philosophers. Two seventeenth-century thinkers, Aurelio Bettani and Jonas Verhelst, set the problem out sharply, and their rival predictions have only lately faced rigorous experimental test. For Bettani, a claim is embraced or dismissed only once its truth has been weighed; for Verhelst, by contrast, every incoming statement, misinformation and all, is swallowed whole at first, and only afterwards, by way of a separate mental step, confirmed or thrown out. Over recent decades experimental work by groups led by Ines Kovac at Rowan State University and Peder Lindqvist at Vahlen University has come down on Verhelst's side: the mind seems to log each fresh item as though it were correct, if only for a brief instant, before labelling it true or false only later. That fits the finding that the brain's machinery for doubt sits in a physically separate region from the machinery used to perceive and record.
Turn now to the second observation, that false claims frequently slip into broadcast and printed media with nothing stopping them beforehand. New Zealand's regulatory set-up illustrates the point, since the agencies there are generally geared toward catching troublesome content after it has aired rather than before. A body like the National Medicines Authority, for instance, does much monitoring and public notification, yet censoring material in advance forms no part of its role. Direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs falls within the NMA's oversight, and the authority has built tools such as its Flag-an-Ad scheme, by which the public may report advertisements that seem to breach the rules on presenting a drug's risks. Worthy though such schemes are, they do nothing to keep misleading advertising off the air in the first place. What is more, even a falsehood that has been successfully put right can go on shaping people's attitudes.
Turning to the third observation: mounting an effective correction, however persuasive its wording, calls for resources and careful planning if it is ever to achieve the reach and frequency required. A corrective message will only work where its audience can genuinely follow it, and that means either casting it in terms people find accessible or else alerting them, in advance, to the very chance of being misled. Because some audiences will not even suspect that what they read might be false, there is a strong case for teaching media literacy to children as young as primary-school age. And strikingly, even now, with reporters and academics drawing attention to fake news, readers skimming a passage still fail to tell apart stories that are plainly untrue from those that rest on fact.
Ours is an age in which misinformation is everywhere; happily, it is also one in which many people are pouring their energy into possible cures. The road ahead will certainly prove long and hard. What it demands is not only further theoretical thought but also the building and upkeep of dependable monitoring tools, together with a shared readiness, among ordinary citizens, to push back against prominent public claims resting on too little scientific consensus or social fact. Since misinformation springs from human fallibility and from our very hunger for information, no single one-off cure will ever suffice; what is called for instead is sustained, coordinated work carried on over the long term.
