Discernment in a Disinformation Age

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Technology Thursday

Fram. Those of us who've been on the Internet a long time (in my case, nearly 20 years now - oh dear) cringe whenever well-meaning but not-so-Internet-savvy friends and relations send us the latest "toxic tampons" or "Obama wants to kill old people" email. I remember having a discussion once with someone about how what they were sending was, well, completely bogus. I pointed them to Snopes.com -- a pretty good debunker of some of the crazy stuff that tends to circulate. Their response to me: "Yeah, well, but how do you know to believe Snopes.com and not these other sites?"

I sighed (internally).

But it's actually a pretty profound--and lifelong--question. Today there is a vast amount of information (and disinformation) available in an instant. Advertising easily devolves into propaganda, and informed criticism and debate has given way to inane and irresponsible he-said/she-said, "Shape of earth: Opinions Differ" kinds of reporting. So what's a busy person to do to separate the wheat from the chaff, the serious from the stupid, and the important or urgent from the merely recreational and entertaining?

The Obama administration ran into an interesting variation on this problem recently. They are trying, several decades after Harry Truman articulated the need, to finally implement a sane health care system. The amount of shrieking propaganda in opposition has been astonishing -- much of it straight from crazy-land along the lines of "Keep the government away from my Medicare!" (One example is a long lie-filled email that claims to be providing a line-by-line analysis of the bill under consideration.) In an effort to understand what manner of information and disinformation is being spread, the Administration put out a request for people to assist, saying:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

Not unexpectedly, they were immediately faced with yet another round of conspiracy-theorizing and calculated rage-making, claiming that the White House is collecting names and asking Americans to snitch on each other. (See here and here, for more.) Policy proposals begat disinformation begat attempts to clarify begat crazed conspiracy theories. Wheels within wheels within wheels.

More generally, the battle for rationality and deliberation over the forces of demagoguery and victimology is, inevitably, an arms race. Can we arm the populace with sufficient critical thinking skills to be able to resist exhortations to emotion and tribe that have succeeded for millennia? On any issue, it's the obfuscators, of course, who have the advantage. If it takes 5 minutes (or half an hour) to explain why a person is wrong for making their crazy claim, that's 5 (or half an hour) minutes the person deconstructing the crazy didn't get to spend explaining their own ideas. I'm not talking about reasoned arguments, here - I mean all the wasted time spent patiently explaining basic facts and rebutting insanities. This is an old problem in a new age. Mark Twain is quoted as saying that:

A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

Setting particular political and policy examples aside, let's go back to the question my friend asked: How do you know who to believe? It's not easy! We all suffer from confirmation bias - being more inclined to believe things that accord with what we already know or believe. And, however much we try to be broad-minded, we tend to associate with people who are much like ourselves. In addition, software tools that I've espoused in other posts make it easier and easier to filter the news and ideas that one is exposed to so that little that doesn't mesh with one's worldviews enters in. The extreme version of this has been criticized as "The Daily Me." (As an aside, Danah Boyd, who I linked in last week's post, gave a great talk recently on like-with-like affiliations on social networking sites. Well worth a read.)

So how do you know? A few tips:

• Keep your doodoo detector turned to high and cultivate a constant skepticism. Apply Occam's Razor whenever possible and remember Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crud) and that TANSTAAFL.
• Get a lot of inputs. The more information you see, the easier it becomes to see patterns of both illumination and obfuscation. Processing a lot of input also helps to train your doodoo detector -- if something seems funny, dig around and see what you can find.
• Curate trusted filters among your information sources in addition to large numbers of lesser-trusted inputs. This is really important, and you can really only discern who's trustworthy over fairly long periods of time. And even then once in awhile they will be wrong about something and you'll get burned. But it's how we learn.
• Keep an eye out for any of a number of logical fallacies when someone is trying to persuade you of something. If you're in the middle of a discussion about a hot topic, keep in mind the tactics described in Derailing for Dummies. Try not to do such things yourself and point out when others are doing them.
• Maintain strong opinions, but keep them weakly held. Learn to logically and vigorously support and defend your point of  view.  But also be willing to change your mind and/or accept that the world may have changed or new facts may have emerged.
• Above all, try to maintain some humility; failing that, at least try to cultivate compassion for those who persist in being wronger than you!

Howard Rheingold has written a splendid piece on Crap Detection 101. A couple pull-quotes from his piece:

Triangulation is what detectives do - try to find three different ways to test a source's credibility. For example, you could Google the author's name, enter the author's name in the scholarly productivity index, and use the literacy resources at factchecked.org to triangulate a source.
[...]
Just as thinking like a detective is a strategy for trying to determine the credibility of webinfo, thinking like an intelligence analyst is a strategy for trying to gauge the credibility of online reports about breaking news events.
[...]
To me, the issue of information literacy could be even more important than the health or education of some individuals. Fundamental aspects of democracy, economic production, the discovery and use of knowledge might be at stake. Some of the biggest problems facing the world today seem to be far beyond the ability of any individual or community, or even the whole human race, to tackle. But the noise death of the Internet is something we can take on and win.

Read. Read a lot. But read with discernment.