Of course, America has long been
entranced by conspiracy theories.
But the online hoaxes and fringe theories appeared more virulent than
their offline predecessors. They were also more numerous and more
persistent. During Mr. Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign,
every attempt to debunk the birther rumor seemed to raise its prevalence online.
In
a 2008 book,
I argued that the internet would usher in a “post-fact” age. Eight
years later, in the death throes of an election that features a
candidate who once led the campaign to lie about President Obama’s
birth, there is more reason to despair about truth in the online age.
Why? Because if you study the dynamics of how information moves online today, pretty much everything conspires against truth.
You’re Not Rational
The root of the problem with online news is something that initially sounds great: We have a lot more media to choose from.
In
the last 20 years, the internet has overrun your morning paper and
evening newscast with a smorgasbord of information sources, from
well-funded online magazines to muckraking fact-checkers to the three
guys in your country club whose Facebook group claims proof that Hillary
Clinton and Donald J. Trump are really the same person.
A wider variety of news sources was supposed to be the bulwark of a rational age —
“the marketplace of ideas,” the boosters called it.
But
that’s not how any of this works. Psychologists and other social
scientists have repeatedly shown that when confronted with diverse
information choices, people rarely act like rational, civic-minded
automatons. Instead, we are
roiled by preconceptions and biases, and
we usually do what feels easiest — we gorge on information that confirms our ideas, and we shun what does not.
This
dynamic becomes especially problematic in a news landscape of
near-infinite choice. Whether navigating Facebook, Google or The New
York Times’s smartphone app, you are given ultimate control — if you see
something you don’t like, you can easily tap away to something more
pleasing. Then we all share what we found with our like-minded social
networks, creating closed-off, shoulder-patting circles online.
That’s
the theory, at least. The empirical research on so-called echo chambers
is mixed. Facebook’s data scientists have run large studies on the idea
and
found it wanting. The social networking company says that by exposing you to more people,
Facebook adds diversity to your news diet.
Others disagree.
A study published last year
by researchers at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, in Italy,
found that homogeneous online networks help conspiracy theories persist
and grow online.
“This
creates an ecosystem in which the truth value of the information
doesn’t matter,” said Walter Quattrociocchi, one of the study’s authors.
“All that matters is whether the information fits in your narrative.”
No Power in Proof
Digital
technology has blessed us with better ways to capture and disseminate
news. There are cameras and audio recorders everywhere, and as soon as
something happens, you can find primary proof of it online.
You
would think that greater primary documentation would lead to a better
cultural agreement about the “truth.” In fact, the opposite has
happened.
Consider the difference in the examples of the John F. Kennedy assassination and 9/11. While you’ve probably seen
only a single film clip of the scene from Dealey Plaza in 1963
when President Kennedy was shot, hundreds of television and amateur
cameras were pointed at the scene on 9/11. Yet neither issue is settled
for Americans;
in one recent survey,
about as many people said the government was concealing the truth about
9/11 as those who said the same about the Kennedy assassination.
Documentary
proof seems to have lost its power. If the Kennedy conspiracies were
rooted in an absence of documentary evidence, the 9/11 theories
benefited from a surfeit of it. So many pictures from 9/11 flooded the
internet, often without much context about what was being shown, that
conspiracy theorists could pick and choose among them to show off exactly the narrative they preferred. There is also the looming specter of Photoshop: Now, because any digital image can be doctored,
people can freely dismiss any bit of inconvenient documentary evidence as having been somehow altered.
This gets to the deeper problem: We all tend to filter documentary evidence through our own biases.
Researchers have shown
that two people with differing points of view can look at the same
picture, video or document and come away with strikingly different ideas
about what it shows.
That
dynamic has played out repeatedly this year. Some people look at the
WikiLeaks revelations about Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and see a smoking
gun, while others say it’s no big deal, and that besides, it’s been
doctored or stolen or taken out of context. Surveys show that people who
liked Mr. Trump
saw the Access Hollywood tape where he casually referenced groping women as mere “locker room talk”; those who didn’t like him considered it the worst thing in the world.
Lies as an Institution
One
of the apparent advantages of online news is persistent fact-checking.
Now when someone says something false, journalists can show they’re
lying. And if the fact-checking sites do their jobs well, they’re likely
to show up in online searches and social networks, providing a ready
reference for people who want to correct the record.
But
that hasn’t quite happened. Today dozens of news outlets routinely
fact-check the candidates and much else online, but the endeavor has
proved largely ineffective against a tide of fakery.
That’s
because the lies have also become institutionalized. There are now
entire sites whose only mission is to publish outrageous, completely
fake news online (like real news, fake news has become a business).
Partisan Facebook pages have gotten into the act; a recent
BuzzFeed analysis of top political pages on Facebook
showed that right-wing sites published false or misleading information
38 percent of the time, and lefty sites did so 20 percent of the time.
“Where
hoaxes before were shared by your great-aunt who didn’t understand the
internet, the misinformation that circulates online is now being
reinforced by political campaigns, by political candidates or by
amorphous groups of tweeters working around the campaigns,” said Caitlin
Dewey, a reporter at The Washington Post who once wrote a column called
“What Was Fake on the Internet This Week.”
Ms. Dewey’s column began in 2014, but by the end of last year,
she decided to hang up her fact-checking hat because she had doubts that she was convincing anyone.
“In
many ways the debunking just reinforced the sense of alienation or
outrage that people feel about the topic, and ultimately you’ve done
more harm than good,” she said.
Other
fact-checkers are more sanguine, recognizing the limits of exposing
online hoaxes, but also standing by the utility of the effort.
