A paper published in the journal Social Media + Society identifies six misconceptions about misinformation, highlighting some of the implicated conceptual and methodological challenges.
Despite misinformation comprising a miniscule proportion of the information people consume, Americans find themselves more concerned by fake news than terrorism, online fraud and online bullying, among other issues.
“I started working on misinformation during my bachelor, right after I stopped believing in various conspiracy theories,” said study author Sacha Altay, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. “Recently, I’ve become annoyed by the discrepancy between the very alarmist headlines on misinformation and the much more nuanced findings of the scientific literature. With my co-authors we wanted to highlight this discrepancy and correct misperceptions many people have about misinformation.”
In this work, Altay and colleagues tackled six misconceptions on misinformation, dividing these into two categories. First, misconceptions regarding the prevalence and circulation of misinformation (1-3), and second, its impact and reception (4-6). They adopted a broad definition of “misinformation” to encompass all types of misleading information, regardless of intent; this approach also accommodates for differences in the conceptualization of misinformation within the literature.
The first misconception they identify is that misinformation presents a problem only on social media. However, researchers focus their efforts on social media given the methodological convenience. It happens that social media makes it easy to quantify social phenomena that were too difficult to track previously. Further, given that active social media users are not representative of the general population, findings drawn from these samples might not even speak to the larger public sphere.
Second, that misinformation is a widespread issue on the internet. They note that misinformation should only be evaluated within the scale of one’s wider informational ecosystem; this would entail incorporating news consumption and avoidance patterns when studying the phenomenon.
Third, that falsehoods get around faster than the truth. The researchers argue that the definition of misinformation shapes perceptions of the issue. It should not merely be framed dichotomously (i.e., true or false), but also in terms of harmfulness and ideological stance. They ask, “Politically biased information that is not false could have harmful effects [], but does it belong in the misinformation category?”
The fourth misconception the authors highlight is that people believe everything they come across online. They suggest this conflates prevalence with impact and acceptance, despite digital traces not necessarily mapping on to expectations.
Fifth, that many people are misinformed. Misperceptions and belief in conspiracies are often inflated by survey measurement (e.g., often lacking “don’t know” / “not sure” response options), and rare behaviors are poorly assessed through this method.
Sixth, and lastly, that misinformation has substantial sway over behavior. The misinformation that people consume tends to align with what they would already accept, and acceptance ought not to be conflated with attitudinal or behavioral change. The same content will generate different mental representations among different groups of people, and whatever digital trace consumers leave behind can only be an approximation of these mental representations.
“People are more reasonable than often assumed. We should be skeptical of claims that people are excessively gullible and that important socio-political events happen because of this presumed gullibility. If anything, the problem is not so much that people are stupid and believe anything, but instead that they are often too stubborn and fail to trust reliable sources enough,” Altay told PsyPost.
“We still know very little about misinformation in legacy media, such as TV, and visual misinformation, such as memes. Researchers need better models of influence and to go beyond correlational studies to study the impact of misinformation. Crucially, we believe that misinformation is largely a symptom of deeper problems, such as lack of trust in institutions or affective polarization, and the root causes of the problem deserve much more attention.”
The researchers conclude that misinformation on misinformation can be just as damaging as the misinformation itself.
The paper, “Misinformation on Misinformation: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges”, was authored by Sacha Altay, Manon Berriche, and Alberto Acerbi.
