Efforts to flood the world’s media with dishonest information or malicious content go to the very top.
Donald Trump derided any critical news coverage as “fake news” and his unwillingness to concede the 2020 presidential election eventually led to the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol.
For years, radio host Alex Jones denounced the parents of children slaughtered in the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newton, Connecticut as "crisis actors." On August 5, 2022 he was ordered by a jury to pay more than US$49 million in damages to two families for defamation.
According to Mathieu O'Neil, Associate Professor at the News and Media Research Centre of the University of Canberra and Michael Jensen, Associate Professor at the Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis of the University of Canberra, three schools of thought have emerged to address this issue.
"The first suggests disinformation is so pervasive because distrust of traditional sources of authority, including the news media, keeps increasing," the academics pointed out. "When people think the mainstream media is not holding industries and governments to account, they may be more likely to accept information that challenges conventional beliefs."
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"Secondly, social media platforms' focus on engagement often leads them to promote shocking claims that generate outrage, regardless of whether these claims are true," O'Neil and Jensen added.
"Indeed, studies show false information on social media spreads further, faster, and deeper than true information because it is more novel and surprising."
And lastly, the role of hostile and deliberate disinformation tactics cannot be overlooked.
"Facebook estimates that during the 2016 US election, malicious content from the Russian Internet Research Agency aimed at creating division within the American voting public reached 126 million people in the US and worldwide," O'Neil and Jensen said to illustrate this point.
So what can we do? Bradley Crocker, Lecturer & Ph.D. Candidate in Health Psychology at McGill University, thinks that in order to be saved from misinformation, we need to be exposed to it.
"Efforts to remove and label misinformation on social media platforms may help, but a more pertinent question is whether these efforts can match the rapid pace of misinformation spread," Crocker wondered. "In response to the growing pressure to control misinformation on their platforms, social media giants have generally relied on reactively removing or labeling false content after it’s widely noticed and reported."
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