The Portents

What will 2022 bring in the way of misinformation on social media? Three experts weigh in.

At the end of 2020, it seemed hard to imagine a worse year for misinformation on social media, given the intensity of the presidential election and the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. But 2021 proved up to the task, starting with the Jan. 6 insurrection and continuing with copious amounts of falsehoods and distortions about COVID-19 vaccines. To get a sense of what 2022 could hold, we asked three researchers about the evolution of misinformation on social media.

Absent regulation, misinformation will get worse

Anjana Susarla

While misinformation has always existed in media – think of the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 that claimed life was discovered on the moon – the advent of social media has significantly increased the scope, spread and reach of misinformation. Social media platforms have morphed into public information utilities that control how most people view the world, which makes misinformation they facilitate a fundamental problem for society. There are two primary challenges in addressing misinformation. The first is the dearth of regulatory mechanisms that address it. Mandating transparency and giving users greater access to and control over their data might go a long way in addressing the challenges of misinformation. But there’s also a need for independent audits, including tools that assess social media algorithms. These can establish how the social media platforms’ choices in curating news feeds and presenting content affect how people see information. The second challenge is that racial and gender biases in algorithms used by social media platforms exacerbate the misinformation problem. While social media companies have introduced mechanisms to highlight authoritative sources of information, solutions such as labelling posts as misinformation don’t solve racial and gender biases in accessing information. Highlighting relevant sources of, for example, health information may only help users with greater health literacy and not people with low health literacy, who tend to be disproportionately minorities. Another problem is the need to look systematically at where users are finding misinformation. TikTok, for example, has largely escaped government scrutiny. What’s more, misinformation targeting minorities, particularly Spanish-language content, may be far worse than misinformation targeting majority communities. I believe the lack of independent audits, lack of transparency in fact checking and the racial and gender biases underlying algorithms used by social media platforms suggest that the need for regulatory action in 2022 is urgent and immediate. —(PTI)

The author is a professor of Information Systems, Michigan State University.

Propaganda by another name

Ethan Zuckerman

I expect the idea of misinformation will shift into an idea of propaganda in 2022, as suggested by sociologist and media scholar Francesca Tripodi in her forthcoming book, “The Propagandist’s Playbook.” Most misinformation is not the result of innocent misunderstanding. It’s the product of specific campaigns to advance a political or ideological agenda.

Once you understand that Facebook and other platforms are the battlegrounds on which contemporary political campaigns are fought, you can let go of the idea that all you need are facts to correct people’s misapprehensions. What’s going on is a more complex mix of persuasion, tribal affiliation and signalling, which plays out in venues from social media to search results.

As the 2022 elections heat up, I expect platforms like Facebook will reach a breaking point on misinformation because certain lies have become political speech central to party affiliation. How do social media platforms manage when false speech is also political speech?

The author is a professor of Public Policy, Communication, The Portents and Information at UMass Amherst.

Growing divisions and cynicism

Dam Hee Kim

“Fake news” is hardly a new phenomenon, yet its costs have reached another level in recent years. Misinformation concerning COVID- 19 has cost countless lives all over the world. False and misleading information about elections can shake the foundation of democracy, for instance, by making citizens lose confidence in the political system. Research I conducted with S Mo Jones-Jang and Kate Kenski on misinformation during elections, some published and some in progress, has turned up three key findings.

The first is that the use of social media, originally designed to connect people, can facilitate social disconnection. Social media has become rife with misinformation. This leads citizens