Opinion: With Bad Information Comes Great Responsibility

Misinformation is not a new concept but the newly crowned online media giants of the 21st century have allowed it to propagate untethered. The avalanche of bad information that journalists and the public face today is one of the defining problems of the century.

The father of modern journalism, Walter Lippmann, argued in the 1920s that “there can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.” Perhaps given the endless ocean of information available the main role of journalists should now be to detect lies and identify, organize, and curate data. Given the ratio of bad to good information online, I believe this would be futile.

Edward O. Wilson, the American Sociobiologist nicknamed “The Darwin of the 21st century,” captures the crux of the problem well when he says that “we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”

One major issue is that regulations and journalism as an institution cannot keep up with technology. In an ironic twist of fate, trust in the media has been wavering while online tech giants like Facebook and Google have taken up huge portions of the advertisement revenues of traditional media without taking on the responsibilities of their predecessors. At best, these modern giants are aggregators of existing news; at worst, an algorithm that amplifies our own personalized echo chamber and cares only about clicks.

Tragically, most of us are not willing to reach for our wallets for quality information when we can make do with free junk news. I myself consistently use online tools to bypass paywalls, despite supposedly caring about journalists and hypocritically wanting to get paid as one. Across 20 countries that include the U.S., France, Germany, and the U.K., only 17 percent of the population has paid for any online news in the last year.

As if that weren’t enough, misinformation can be used to manipulate public opinion and drive a wedge between citizens and their government by polarizing the democratic process. The Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections is a prime example.

Additionally, misinformation has amplified damaging effects when it reaches those in positions of power. At the time of his presidency, Trump claimed that the virus would “miraculously go away” and that it was “like a flu.” Deaths from the pandemic in the US might have been cut in half as of May 3, 2020, if administrators had listened to experts’ advice just one or two weeks earlier.

What can journalists do against such reckless misinformation? We will need collective responsibility. We can also start by acquiring an international perspective. Although the internet has opened the floodgates for misinformation, it has also allowed for digital journalism to thrive by finding out what goes on around the globe much quicker in a networked and decentralized manner. This means that journalists can and should be reporting on legislations passed elsewhere that address misinformation.

For example, a law passed in France in 2018 requires social media companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to disclose who has sponsored online content or political ads and at what price. This transparency requirement echoes the United States’ Honest Ads legislation, which extended its existing broadcast standards to social media. Such actions ensure that the democratic process, increasingly influenced by new technologies, remains open to investigation and accountability.

The UK government announced that as of 2020, children in primary and secondary schools are taught to recognize and respond to misinformation online. They learn about topics related to spreading stories through confirmation bias, how to recognize manipulation and persuasion techniques, and how to make judgements about the accuracy of an online post.

More recently, in 2021, the Australian government has been trying to make Facebook pay news organizations when it shares links to news stories but collects ad revenues for itself.

Beyond journalists reporting on legislation that is slowly catching up to technology, the public now participates as armchair journalists in movements like the Arab Spring and the MeToo campaign. With this democratization of information must come a dilution of responsibility amidst the public.

Fake news is nothing new. In fact, it is related to the initial development of journalistic methods of verification and codes of ethics. If we are all willing to embrace these standards of verification, then each of us has access to the almost entire wealth of human knowledge. That doesn’t sound like a bad deal.