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Democracies rely on their citizens to make decisions, but citizens cannot be trusted to make honest decisions when the information they receive is inaccurate. Misinformation, the false spread of information with the intent to deceive, poses a serious threat to the democratic systems many countries live in. In the United States, misinformation has become so prevalent that its influence can overturn elections. If the United States cannot effectively regulate false news, its influence will only continue to grow and any premise of a true democracy will soon be eradicated.
In 2016, Donald J. Trump was elected to be the president of the United States. While he used many usual political campaign strategies, Donald Trump also influenced his voters by the spread of misinformation. Misinformation in the United States was so prevalent in this election that “more than a third of the top 200 stories about the two US Presidential candidates were from fake news sites during the two months before the election.” (Seth Fiegerman, 2017). With fake news sites so prevalent in the news, it was very easy for people to see fake news and believe it to be true. It was easy to corroborate false information because people were able to find multiple sites saying the exact same thing.
Social media makes spreading misinformation even easier. “Content can be relayed among users with no significant third party filtering, fact-checking, or editorial judgment. An individual user with no track record or reputation can in some cases reach as many readers as Fox News, CNN, or the New York Times” (Hunt Alcott, 2017). Freedom of speech has taken on a much larger role in American society since the creation of social media. People are now able to share what they want to say easily, quickly, and to a large audience. This is a reason for the large threat of misinformation. People are given a platform where they can say anything and can affect anywhere from tens to millions of people, whether or not what they are saying is true.
When people hear stories that are shocking, those stories often stick. This is because of confirmation bias. As long as people want something to be true, confirmation bias will lead them to latch onto findings that support their beliefs and ignore findings that conflict with their beliefs. Social media only makes this easier to do, by using algorithms to encourage the same filtration of information. This phenomenon of automated filtration by algorithms is called a filter bubble. Social media platforms use filter bubbles to keep an individual engaged. They know that the longer they can keep an individual engaged, the more they can expose that individual to advertisement, and the more money they will make.
If someone turns off their phone after seeing something they disagree with, social media platforms lose money. So, to keep them scrolling, platforms will continuously give an individual shocking information that coincides with their beliefs. This process keeps readers engaged even when the information is inaccurate. Many people are misled as an effect of these processes, but these platforms do not care about this unless their reputation or income is threatened. They only care to intervene when the checks stop rolling in.
In addition to the financial motivation of social media platforms themselves, individual motivation plays a great role in the spread of misinformation. Specifically, there is a large motivation for individuals to achieve financial gain. “News articles that go viral on social media can draw significant advertising revenue when users click to the original site. This appears to have been the main motivation for most of the producers whose identities have been revealed” (Hunt Alcott, 2017). To have more clicks, articles often cover topics that large groups of people will find shocking. All of those people will want to read more and will proceed to click on the article and share it with their network, saying ‘Can you believe this?’. Although many articles gain revenue from people seeing ads on their articles, some do not even bother to write an article. Clickbait articles are articles where “...clicking on the post did not take the user to any news article, but rather to a marketing website.” (Richard Ling, 2018). While these sites do not have articles to persuade people, they still have titles to click on. People who just read the heading may believe it without thinking, and the more they hear about it, the more they believe it. Even people who click on it may think the story could still be true, they just couldn’t get the article. Individual financial motivation is very strong, even leading teenagers to engage in these strategies to make money. “During the U.S. election, teenagers in Macedonia reportedly created more than 100 fake political news websites and promoted them on Facebook, all in order to make money from online advertising.” (Hunt Alcott, 2017) It is so easy to fall susceptible to either the draw of making money or the draw of a shocking article, making this process extremely hard to regulate.
Rather than simply asking how misinformation affected and continues to affect elections, citizens need to ask why this is still a problem. Why, in 2016, were more than a third of the top news articles fake news? Doesn’t the United States have regulations for that? Well, it’s complicated. The United States needs to stick to its constitution, meaning that it needs to let people express their freedom of speech. “both the political left and right fear that the term ‘fake news’ is open to exploitation, owing to its ambiguity. Moreover, there may be inherent biases when humans and machines (algorithms) endeavor to judge whether content is ‘manifestly’ fake news.” (2018) So, it’s difficult to regulate because there is so much left up to interpretation. It is hard to define what is considered misinformation and what is simply considered an expression of freedom of speech.
Another problem is the short life of fake news articles, and the variety of news they share. “Still other sites, such as endingthefed.com, print a mix between factual articles, often with a partisan slant, along with some false articles. Websites supplying fake news tend to be short lived and many that were important in the run-up to the 2016 election no longer exist” (Hunt Alcott, 2017). This is problematic because fake news sites come and go so often that by the time someone realizes a website is spreading misinformation, that article is gone and it can’t be easily pinpointed. Additionally, if websites print a mix of information, an audience can be led to believe that if one thing is true, the other articles must be true. The viewer will see a few true articles as evidence that all articles are correct. They will be more susceptible to fake news when they believe they are hearing it from a site that tells the truth.
So how can we go about regulating false news in a more efficient and just way? Well, some progress has already been made. After the 2016 election, facebook decided it needed to make a change. “Facebook has employed algorithmic techniques, including machine learning, to target fake accounts - looking for ‘false amplifiers’ of political stances, coordinated attempts to share and like certain posts, online harassment or the creation of ‘inflammatory or racist’ content.” (2018). Facebook makes it easier to identify misinformation by tracking behavior to find fake news instead of fact checking every single article in order to find an article spreading fake news. This is helpful because it is quicker and may be able to find the source of misinformation before that article is deleted.
In addition, users can flag articles they think may be fake and if found true, facebook will put warning labels beneath the link. This approach helps by introducing friction. “Design solutions that avoid virality and instead introduce friction should make it harder to spread hate and easier to engage constructively online.” (Karen Kornbluh, 2020)This idea of introducing friction refers to the small things that make people stop and think before repeating information or clicking on a link. The way things become viral is when they get shared fast, without a second to stop and think. If users start to think before they share, misinformation will have less of a power over democracies. When facebookstarts to introduce users into the process of regulating information they allow them to have more control and can help introduce friction for others.
While this approaches has been beneficial there are still some significant drawbacks. “Carvin says Facebook's current fact-checking system is only built to debunk ‘indisputably, fully fake stories.’” (Seth Fiegerman, 2017) This is problematic because people may not be warned about articles that have a partisan slant, or that share a lot of true stories but will add in something untrue. Facebook’s approach doesn’t warn users about these small pieces of false information that slowly affect people’s beliefs. The bottom line is, people are still being misled.
In order to help solve this problem, it is helpful to look at other proposed ways to combat misinformation. Instead of focusing on more government or platform regulation, one approach also empowers users to help regulate misinformation. “Users should be able to customize algorithmic recommendations and easily track content complaints” (Karen Kornbluh, 2020). Giving users more freedom over how much they allow platforms to track them can help stop the power of filter bubbles. It can help people become more exposed to information they may not necessarily agree with, and help them challenge their own views. “it should be easy to distinguish transparent and ethical journalistic practices from trolling content and to tell if video has been altered.”(Karen Kornbluh, 2020) In this method, users have more say in the information they are consuming and are more aware of the truth of what they are consuming.
Misinformation is a major problem in the United States and in democracies around the world. It can literally overturn elections. If we are to have any hope of a true democracy we need to ensure that people make their decisions based on facts rather than outlandish stories. Although freedom of speech comes in the way of sharing news even if it is false, we need to learn as a country when to draw that line. Our platforms need to continue to step up and make changes. More friction needs to be introduced in order to make users think twice before they consume and share information. People need to know if they can trust an article, or at least to introduce healthy skepticism when they click on it. Companies and citizens need to step up in order to ensure democracies stay democracies.
Works Cited
Allcott, H. 2017 “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 election” retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/44235006?searchText=fake+news&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dfake%2Bnews&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Ac8d68ba48e52652131a3a32783fea082
Fiegerman, S. 2017 “Facebook’s Global fight against fake news” retrieved from https://money.cnn.com/2017/05/09/technology/facebook-fake-news/index.html
Kornbluh, K. 2020 “Safeguarding Digital Democrac: Digital Innovation Democracy Initiative Roadmap” retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep24545?searchText=fake+news+twitter+2016+election&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dfake%2Bnews%2Btwitter%2B2016%2Belection&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A285b3f6e2e9a8b043340dd905f7b6fa2&seq=6
Ling, R. 2018 “Defining ‘Fake News’” retrieved from https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/4948550/mod_resource/content/1/Fake%20News%20Digital%20Journalism%20-%20Tandoc.pdf
2018 “International Responses To Fake News” retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep17648.8
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