In the age of social media, the notions of truth, information, and knowledge are all changing. These notions were once amorphous and invisible – the kinds of airy, invisible topics only philosophers and a few scientists studied. But today truth, information, and knowledge are all represented, constructed, and battled about online. Page views, shares, and reactions clue individuals and companies in to what spreads from machine to machine and mind to mind. Content editable by users online is negotiated and changed in real time. In this chapter we’ll look at the problems and opportunities afforded by social media in relationship with truths and knowledge.

Knowledge is always based on multiple pieces of information, and usually involves finding coherence across them when they conflict.​ (Image: human_knowledge_gears, Lightspring, https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/teamwork-leadership-education-symbol-represented-by-81043615, CC0)

“Fake news” and “post-truth”

Much has been made in recent years of “fake news.” This is a term, favored by the President of the United States among others, that circulates ubiquitously through social as well as traditional media. In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries presented “post-truth” as its “word of the year.” But what do these terms mean, and what do they have to do with social media?

To understand these terms, we have to look closely at what we expect with the word “news” and notions of truth and “fake”-ness. These conversations start with the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity.

Objectivity and subjectivity

To be objective is to present a truth in a way that would also be true for anyone anywhere; so that truth exists regardless of anyone’s perspective. The popular notion of what is true is often based on this expectation of objective truth.

The expectation of objective truth makes sense in some situations – related to physics and mathematics, for example. However, humans’ presentations of both current and historic events have always been subjective – that is, one or more subjects with a point of view have presented the events as they see or remember them. When subjective accounts disagree, journalists and historians face a tricky process of figuring out why the accounts disagree, and piecing together what the evidence is beneath subjective accounts, to learn what is true.

Multiple truths = knowledge production

In US society, we have not historically thought about knowledge as being a negotiation among multiple truths. Even at the beginning of the 21st century, the production of knowledge was considered the domain of those privileged with the highest education – usually from the most powerful sectors of society. For example, when I was growing up, the Encyclopedia Britannica was the authority I looked to for general information about everything. I did not know who the authors were, but I trusted they were experts.

Enter Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, and everything changed.

The first version of Wikipedia was founded on a more similar model to the Encyclopedia Britannica than it is now. It was called Nupedia, and only experts were invited to contribute. But then one of the co-founders, Jimmy Wales, decided to try a new model of knowledge production based on the concept of collective intelligence, written about by Pierre Lévy. The belief underpinning collective intelligence, and Wikipedia, is that no one knows everything, but everyone knows something. Everyone was invited to contribute to Wikipedia. And everyone still is.

When many different perspectives are involved, there can be multiple and even conflicting truths around the same topic. And there can be intense competition to put forth some preferred version of events. But the more perspectives you see, the more knowledge you have about the topic in general. And the results of negotiation between multiple truths can be surprisingly accurate when compared with known truths. A 2005 study in the prominent journal Nature comparing the accuracy of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia found they had around the same numbers of errors and levels of accuracy.

What are truths?

And the third ingredient of a truth? That is you, the human reader. As an interpreter, and sometimes sharer/spreader of online information and “news”, you must keep an active mind. You are catching up with that truth in real-time. Is it true, based on evidence available to you from your perspective? Even if it once seemed true, has evidence recently emerged that reveals it to not be true? Many truths are not true forever; as we learn more, what once seemed true is often revealed to not be true.

Truths are not always profitable, so they compete with a lot of other types of content online. As a steward of the world of online information, you have to work to keep truths in circulation.

Case Study: Searchability: The Helpful, but Inescapable Nature of Online Media

Student Content

As a member of Generation “Z”, commonly known as the iGeneration or Internet Generation, I grew up being told not to listen to what I read on the internet. However, as more and more members of our society have become more trusting of the internet as a source for information, communication, and conversation, it has gained more praise than ever before. Unfathomable amounts of data are stored in, and accessible, via the internet. The question is: is that necessarily a good thing?

Reddit, an immensely popular forum website, is particularly known for being a useful tool in answering everyday questions, no matter how specific they may be. A simple search of a question and the addition of the word “Reddit” at the end brings up previous posts ranging anywhere from 1 hour to 9 years ago, allowing internet-browsing individuals to find a thread that begins with their very own question or concern and ends with, more often than not, a pretty useful answer.

Not only does Reddit seem to have a post for everything, but it also may seem like it contains a community for everything too. The other day I showed my friend a video of a cat that I enjoyed, and he informed me that there is a group/ community on Reddit, known as a “subreddit”, that is dedicated to that specific cat.

You may already be able to tell that this aspect of searchability leads to some problems. To begin, when we consider the very nature of this practice of searching, it boggles the mind. Of course, at least 1 other person has had this same question, comment, concern, or opinion as you, considering the sheer amount of people we have on this planet. Different cultures, beliefs, etc. are so easily shared via the internet, and in turn, so easily searched for by others.

When applied to information, this ability to refine a search to such minute details combined with the presence of misinformation, disinformation, and bullshit often results in confirmation bias. In the digital universe, you are bound to have a multitude of individuals and sources that support a belief or claim that you have, even though that belief may be backed up solely by multitudes of “sources” riddled with dangerously false information.

Let’s think back to the “subreddit” my friend showed me. If there is a community on Reddit specifically dedicated to a random internet cat with around 30k members total, what other communities are able to exist, and be searched for, on Reddit? Some communities have incredibly dark, disturbing, and disgusting content that has been shared previously by various members. Examples of these communities include r/CreepShots, a community where suggestive images of women were shared without their consent or knowledge. Another example is r/WatchPeopleDie, a page full of horrendous videos depicting the real-time deaths of individuals (Wikipedia 2021). Whenever content is posted on the internet, including the horrific material posted in these communities, it can be searched for and found by almost anyone who browses the internet.

When I think back to my childhood, and being told not to trust what I hear on the internet, and not to search for “bad things”, I always brushed it off, thinking that there was no way for me to be able to find that sort of content from just a google search. Now that I’m older, I realize that almost anything can exist on the internet, and in turn, anything can be searched for.

References:

Controversial Reddit communities. (2021, April 11). Retrieved April 13, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities

Kochkodin, B. (2021, January 25). How Reddit’s WallStreetBets Pushed GameStop Shares to the Moon. Retrieved April 13, 2021, from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-25/how-wallstreetbets-pushed-gamestop-shares-to-the-moon

About the Author

Devon is an Undecided Major, but has many hobbies including drawing, collage art, journaling, and online gaming. She considers herself to be an amateur writer with big ideas.

Respond to this case study…The author states that misinformation, disinformation, and bullshit lead to confirmation bias. What is a real-world example of when false information led to confirmation bias?

 

Why people spread “fake news” and bad information

“Fake news” has multiple meanings in our culture today. When politicians and online discussants refer to stories as fake news, they are often referring to news that does not match their perspective. But there are news stories generated today that are better described as “fake” – based on no evidence.

So why is “fake news” more of an issue today than it was at some points in the past?

Well, historically “news” has long been the presentation of information on current events in our world. In past eras of traditional media, a much smaller number of people published news content. There were codes of ethics associated with journalism, such as the Journalist’s Creed written by Walter Williams in 1914. Not all journalists followed this or any other code of ethics, but in the past, those who behaved unethically were often called out by their colleagues and unemployable with trusted news organizations.

Today, thanks to Web 2.0 and social media sites, nearly anyone can create and widely circulate stories branded as news; the case study of a story by Eric Tucker in this New York Times lesson plan is a good example. And the huge mass of “news” stories that results involves stories created based on a variety of motivations. This is why Oxford Dictionaries made the term post-truth their word of the year for 2016.

People or agencies may spread stories as news online to:

• spread truth
• influence others
• generate profit

Multiple motivations may drive someone to create or spread a story not based on evidence. But when spreading truth is not one of the story creators’ concerns, you could justifiably call that story “fake news.” I try not to use that term these days though; it’s too loaded with politics. I prefer to call “news” unconcerned with truth by its more scientific name…

Bullshit!

Think I’m bullshitting you when I say bullshit is the scientific name for fake news? Well, I’m not. There are information scientists and philosophers who study different types of bad information, and here are some of basic overviews of their classifications for bad information:

• misinformation = inaccurate information; often spread without intention to deceive
• disinformation = information intended to deceive
• bullshit = information spread without concern for whether or not it’s true

Professors Kay Mathiesen and Don Fallis at the University of Arizona have written that much of the “fake news” generated in the recent election season was bullshit, because producers were concerned with winning influence or profit or both, but were unconcerned with whether it was true.

Bugs in the human belief system

We believe bullshit, fake news, and other types of deceptive information based on numerous interconnected human behaviors. Forbes recently presented an article, Why Your Brain May Be Wired To Believe Fake News, which broke down a few of these with the help of the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin. Levitin cited two well-researched human tendencies that draw us to swallow certain types of information while ignoring others.

• One tendency is belief perseverance: You want to keep believing what you already believe, treasuring a preexisting belief like Gollum treasures the ring in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series.
• The other tendency is confirmation bias: the brain runs through the text of something to select the pieces of it that confirm what you think is already true, while knocking away and ignoring the pieces that don’t confirm what you believe.

These tendencies to believe what we want to hear and see are exacerbated by social network-enabled filter bubbles (described in Chapter 4 of this book.) When we get our news through social media, we are less likely to see opposing points of view, which social networking sites filter out, and which we are unlikely to see on our own.

There is concern that youth and students are particularly vulnerable to believing deceptive online content. But I believe that with some training, youth are going to be better at “reading” than those older than them. Youth are accustomed to online content layered with pictures, links, and insider conversations and connections. The trick to “reading” in the age of social media is to read all of these layers, not just the text.

Dr. Daly’s steps to “reading” social media news stories in 2020:

1. Put aside your biases. Recognize and put aside your belief perseverance and your confirmation bias. You may want a story to be true or untrue, but you probably don’t want to be fooled by it.
2. Read the story’s words AND its pictures. What are they saying? What are they NOT saying?
3. Read the story’s history AND its sources. Who / where is this coming from? What else has come from there and from them?
4. Read the story’s audience AND its conversations. Who is this source speaking to, and who is sharing and speaking back? How might they be doing so in coded ways? (Here‘s an example to make you think about images and audience, whether or not you agree to Filipovic’s interpretation.)
5. Before you share, consider fact-checking. Reliable fact-checking sites at the time of this writing include:

• politifact.com
• snopes.com
• factcheck.org

That said – no one fact-checking site is perfect.; neither is any one news site. All are subjective and liable to be taken over by partisan interests or trolls.

Related Content

COVID-19 vaccines for children: How parents are influenced by misinformation, and how they can counter it

(Jaime Sidani, Beth Hoffman, and Maya Ragavan, University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences, from The Conversation)

Health care providers are just one trusted source of information for parents on the safety of COVID-19 vaccines for children. Cavan Images/Cavan via Getty Images

Jaime Sidani, Beth Hoffman, and Maya Ragavan, University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences

Since COVID-19 vaccines became available for children ages 5 to 11 in early November 2021, many families have been lining up to get their school-age kids vaccinated prior to holiday travel and gatherings.

As of Dec. 14, 5.6 million U.S. children ages 5 to 11 – or about 19% of this age group – have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. And 2.9 million, or about 10% of this age group, are fully vaccinated.

However, the pace has begun to slow. Vaccination rates in this age group vary widely across the country, and the U.S. is still far from reaching a threshold that would help keep COVID-19 infections in check.

We are a team of medical and public health professionals at the University of Pittsburgh. We have extensive experience researching vaccine misinformation on social media and working with community partners to address vaccine hesitancy, counter misinformation and promote vaccine equity.

Through this work, we have seen and studied the ways that anti-vaccine activists on social media target vulnerable parents who are trying to navigate the challenges of digesting health information to make appropriate choices for their children.

Social media and vaccine misinformation

Anti-vaccine activists are a small but vocal group. According to research conducted by the non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate, just 12 social media accounts – the “disinformation dozen” – are behind the majority of anti-vaccine posts on Facebook. Studies also show that only about 2% of parents reject all vaccines for their children. A larger group, or about 20% of parents, can more accurately be described as vaccine hesitant, which means they are undecided about having their children receive vaccines as recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention.

With regard to COVID-19 vaccines specifically, as of October 2021, about one-third of parents with children ages 5 to 11 years said they would get their child vaccinated right away. Another one-third said they would wait to see how the vaccine is working, and the last one-third said they would definitely not get their child vaccinated.

It can be difficult for parents to sort through the large amount of information available about COVID-19 vaccines – both true and untrue. In their search for answers, some parents turn to social media platforms. The problem is, these parents are often targeted by anti-vaccine activists who are better organized and more skilled at tailoring their messages to the varied concerns of people who are vaccine hesitant in comparison to pro-vaccine activists.

Social media, in particular, has been a primary vehicle for the spread of misinformation. Although sometimes misinformation is blatantly false, other times it is more like a game of telephone. A kernel of truth gets modified slightly as it is retold, which ends up becoming something untrue. Unfortunately, exposure to COVID-19 misinformation has been shown to reduce people’s intent to get vaccinated.

Addressing parents’ vaccine concerns

So how can pediatricians and other health care professionals empower parents to feel confident in the choice to get their children vaccinated for COVID-19?

The answer may lie in working with communities to promote the vaccine as trustworthy instead of simply asking communities to trust it. We are part of the Pittsburgh Community Vaccine Collaborative, which is a community-academic partnership that seeks to ensure equitable access to the COVID-19 vaccines. Through that effort, we have focused on building trustworthiness of the vaccines and of the providers and health systems that are offering the vaccines in their communities.

Health care providers are a trusted source of information for COVID-19 vaccine information, but they are not the only sources. Research has found that it is important to lean on the expertise and voices of community partners, community health workers and religious leaders.

Our research suggests that pediatricians and public health professionals can effectively use social media to promote vaccination and provide families with reputable scientific information to address their questions and concerns. Results of a survey that was recently published in Academic Pediatrics found that 96% of parents used social media. Of those, 68% reported using it for health information.

For example, a pediatric group we partner with uses comedy combined with information to combat myths and answer questions about the COVID-19 vaccines.

Social media is also an effective way to reach adolescents who can decide for themselves if they want to get a COVID-19 vaccine without their parents’ consent (in some cities and states). Adolescents may also be able to influence their parents.

Research shows that parents who report high COVID-19 vaccine intention for themselves also report high COVID-19 vaccine intention for their children. Therefore, talking about vaccines as a family may be helpful in combating misinformation around the COVID-19 vaccine. In addition, parents who have had their children vaccinated can use social media to share their experiences and make it feel more normal and accepted among their peers.

We have also learned that promoting media literacy, which encourages people to question the media information they come into contact with, can empower parents to sift through the “infodemic” of COVID-19 vaccine information. While social media platforms have announced policies of removing vaccine misinformation, research suggests this is not always effective at reducing the influence of such misinformation. Learning how to find the source of a piece of information and thinking about who are the intended targets may help people determine whether the information is true or distorted.

Next steps

Addressing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation can feel overwhelming. The American Academy of Pediatrics has helpful information for parents to support making decisions around the COVID-19 vaccine. Parents can also have conversations with their children about media literacy and evaluating information. And they can talk to their children – especially adolescent-age children – about how getting the COVID-19 vaccine can protect them and others.

Increasing COVID-19 vaccine rates for children and young people is important to promote their health and wellness, as well as to move closer to ending the pandemic.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.