A recent study out of Columbia University concluded that most Americans can tell the difference between fake and real news. According to researchers, the key predictor is an individual’s exposure to quality news sources overall; to defeat misinformation all we have to do, they suggest, is raise media literacy across the board. A simple prescription for a major social problem, right?
Yet, another team of researchers aligned with NYU and Stanford recently concluded that when people evaluate misinformation using online resources, they end up more likely to fall prey to online lies . Yes, that’s right: as with quicksand, the more some people try to get free of misinformation, the deeper they sink.
Reconciling these two contradictory findings requires a mental contortion worthy of Captain Yossarin : If you don’t have access to quality news, you’ll fall for misinformation; but if you have to look for quality news, you’ll end up falling for bad news anyway.
If none of this worries you, take a glance at the calendar. We are in the midst of the 2024 Olympics of Misinformation, also known as the U.S. presidential election season. Meaning, if you intend to have a conversation about politics with a friend, relative, neighbor, or coworker in the weeks ahead, you are highly likely to encounter at least one person with a fractured view of what’s what. One person, one vote.
Read More: Misinformation Is Warfare
Luckily, I am (as of this writing) the nation’s foremost expert in misinformation capture theory—and I have some suggestions.
OK, I made that last part up. There’s no such thing as misinformation capture, and I’m not a social science researcher. However, I am a novelist, and that means I’m good at making up things other people want to believe. And I think about misinformation pretty much all the time.
Yet even I’m exhausted by the amount of analysis required to suss the truth when reading some headlines. I know politicians lie or obfuscate and always have, but it feels worse, lately. I am (like most Americans) pretty sure I can spot a lie when I see it. But when it comes to misinformation, there’s only one thing we can know for certain: that nothing’s certain. Even—and especially—our own certainty.
A recent think piece in the New York Times surmised that the Blair Witch Project was the first film to misrepresent itself with a fake web site as a marketing tactic —a dubious turning point in what we expect from the pop culture we consume. Of course, one scary movie alone can’t change how society works. But it can signify a shift. Skip ahead a few news cycles, and people now basically expect online misinformation to run rampant during elections –and trust in media during the off-season isn’t much better . Trust in governments or religious institutions are at all-time lows . Social media platforms have made us fickle with approval and quick to anger .
As a culture, we have largely thrown out the gatekeeper model in media, music, and mass communications, and we have fallen hard for the idea that the individual could be his or her own best decider. At the heart of this decision is the well-intentioned but problematic Horatio Alger myth that anyone can do anything in America. That political neophytes can shake up politics for the better. That anybody who can generate a data viz is qualified to debate public health mandates. And it’s partly true—we all have ideas, we’re all capable of great possibilities. There’s just one problem: not all my ideas are equal to your ideas on every topic. We all have blind spots— some larger than others . How can you know if you don’t know what you think you know when what you know is all you know?
Look, I don’t have a foolproof method for freeing misinformation captives. But I do believe the best way to spot misinformation is to be a better reader. A better listener. A more careful thinker. And the only way to do that is with practice. We all need to think, consider, and evaluate a story while we’re hearing it for the first time. This isn’t an easy cognitive task. But it’s doable. It doesn’t even have to be work. To coin a phrase—sometimes, thinking is fun.
When my kids were in elementary school, I walked them to school daily, and because the route was long for their little legs, sometimes I’d distract them with riddles. Usually, the riddle was a story with a mystery at the center: how did the woman get poisoned , who murdered the man in the tower , how to get a liar to confess . They loved to suss out the truth by asking questions, guessing at possible causes. I knew a riddle was a good one when I heard them tell it to someone else, later—often with the details slightly garbled, the logic faintly askew. They loved the feeling of unlocking the truth.
As they’ve gotten older, they have begun to navigate to school and through life on their own, and these riddle-solving, truth-finding skills only get more useful. In the online world as much as the real one. I can’t tell them who to trust in every situation. I can’t go with them everywhere anymore. I don’t even know who they’re with all the time. I have to trust that as parents my wife and I have given them the tools to make good decisions, and as such now we just have to step back and watch—and try to relax.
Listening closely to other people’s stories; trusting that you yourself possess only a limited understanding of events; watching and waiting and thinking about how something you believe could be wrong—these are the tools of a novelist and a parent equally. They’re also great ways to avoid the trap of misinformation.
Understanding each other better is the foundation of a civil society. Civil society! Is that still a thing? It’s not something I hear people talk about much anymore. Certainly it’s not the modus operandi of the online world. Maybe it never existed, except in the dreams of writers and artists.
For my part I like to think the rumors are true: we are capable of a better world. All we have to do is tell the story enough times, double check all the facts, rehearse all the lines till every detail is right, and we can make it real.
Contact us at letters@time.com .
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