LONDON — When Donald Trump won in 2016, social media got the blame. Not this time.
Trump’s first victory in the U.S. presidential election that year — plus the shock vote in the U.K. to leave the European Union — had the chattering classes on both sides of the Atlantic scrambling for an explanation. They soon found social media.
In the case of Brexit, the argument went, voters were brainwashed by shadowy data outfit Cambridge Analytica; in the case of Trump, it was Russian trolls.
“Everyone was saying technology is to blame,” said Reece Peck, associate professor of journalism and political communication at the City University of New York. “These algorithms are to blame.”
What followed was almost a decade of alarm over disinformation, with legislators agonizing over which ideas social media platforms should allow to propagate, and hand-wringing at how this was all irrevocably corroding the foundations of society.
A vibrant cottage industry — dubbed “Big Disinfo” — sprang up to fight back against bad information. NGOs poured money into groups pledging to defend democracy against merchants of mistruth, while fact-checking operations promised to patrol the boundaries of reality.
Not everyone was convinced of the threat, however.
In the days after the 2016 election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said there was “a profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw fake news.”
Eight years later, after Trump’s decisive second victory, Zuckerberg’s view is newly resonant.
This time around, “there’s no big mystery, like, wow, why did this happen?” said Kelly McBride, a media ethics researcher at the Poynter Institute. “Nobody was tricked into voting for Donald Trump.”
But Trump’s victory is just the latest blow to the Big Disinfo narrative that gained prominence in the intervening years.
The disinfo boom
The study of disinformation predates 2016, but the field underwent a renaissance post-Trump — newly animated by the possibilities of social media brainwashing.
The focus quickly shifted from disinformation — mistruths spread intentionally to deceive — to the broader and more pervasive category of misinformation, which percolates unwittingly through the populace.
The clamor only grew when the Covid pandemic hit, triggering the “infodemic” — the avalanche of mistruths President Joe Biden warned was “killing people.” It culminated in the ejection of Donald Trump from a number of social media platforms following the Jan. 6, 2021 attempted insurrection.
Four years later and Trump is once again president-elect (and back on Facebook), vaccine skepticism is rising, and trust in the media continues its precipitous decline. Against this backdrop, misinformation researchers are beginning to question the utility of their field.
There is currently a “crisis in the field of misinformation studies,” announced an October article in Harvard University’s Misinformation Review.
“For almost a decade,” misinformation has been a central fixation of political elites, non-profits and the media, the authors wrote. Despite this, “it can sometimes feel as if the field is no closer to answering basic questions about misinformation’s real-world impacts, such as its effects on elections or links to extremism and radicalization.”
Foundational issues such as how to define misinformation are still vexing the field, the authors note.
The work is frustrated by “incredibly polarizing” conversations on the role misinformation plays in society. For example, whether “Facebook significantly shaped the results of 2016 elections” — which, eight years on, is still inconclusive, although studies have cast doubt on Russian bot farms having had much to do with it.
Fracturing under scrutiny
Experts trying to unpick major political events are starting to cast their nets wider.
“I think people within the field have come to realize that information and how it shapes our views of the world is certainly an important thing to understand,” said Felix Simon, communication researcher and research fellow in AI and Digital News at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
“But it’s not the only factor, and in many cases not even the most important factor, driving political decisions, even including those that we personally might find problematic.”
This isn’t the only premise that has started to fracture under scrutiny.
At its zeitgeisty zenith, the field’s assumptions could be distilled as follows: Bad actors are circulating incorrect information online, people are unwittingly absorbing it, and their beliefs and behaviors are changing for the worse.
The antidote was to correct the falsehoods, first and foremost through exerting pressure on social media platforms to remove or otherwise flag or de-prioritize the offending content.
The problem was new because social media was new and was exerting novel influences on how people behaved. It was a pervasive problem that held significance for society at large.
The prevailing view among journalists and scholars was that it was a “bottom-up” problem: Nefarious actors, possibly funded by hostile foreign states, were polluting the bedrock of public discourse, contaminating the rest of the ecosystem.
“There was the ‘sky is falling’ view coming out of the 2016 election [which was] exacerbated by the fact that this was the home turf of the major media, so it seemed especially important to journalists,” said Matthew Baum, professor of global communications at Harvard University.
A 2022 Pew survey found that 71 percent of journalists thought made-up news and information was a “very big problem,” compared to 50 percent of American adults.
But studies since then have revealed that the most egregious misinformation only tends to be consumed by a small swath of highly invested, conspiratorially-inclined people.
“It’s not always the case that people believe and do bad things because they were exposed to bad information about it,” Baum said. “People often bring attitudes and opinions to the table and then seek out information that is consistent with them.”
An age-old problem
It should be noted that the most powerful misinformation isn’t spread solely by anonymous internet trolls.
Instead, “the most consequential misinformation tends to come from prominent, powerful domestic actors, top politicians,” said Rasmus Nielsen, professor at the Department of Communication of the University of Copenhagen.
The majority of this information isn’t outright lies, either, but is more likely to be nuggets of truth framed or decontextualized in a misleading way. And it’s not restricted to social media. “Many of these claims are made at campaign rallies,” Nielsen said. “They’re made in televised debates or other forms of media coverage.”
It’s also not a new problem. Baum said he shows students a Harper’s Magazine article trumpeting the dangers of fake news to democracy — dated October 1925.
Many expressed doubts over the social media hypothesis from the beginning. “For those who study political communication, I think that framing was always kind of odd,” Nielsen said.
Economists were more likely to point to the long tail of destruction wrought by the 2008 financial crisis to explain the populist surge and unexpected 2016 electoral results, than a rotten informational diet.
Research conducted in the interim has helped vindicate the skeptics. “It’s created kind of a revisionist view in the field that … maybe this isn’t the biggest danger we’re facing,” Baum said.
Some scholars believe the unavoidable subjectivity involved in defining “misinformation” renders it inappropriate as a field of scientific inquiry altogether.
“Although misleading information is widespread and harmful, there can’t be — more precisely, there shouldn’t be — a science of misleading content,” wrote Dan Williams, an assistant professor in philosophy at the University of Sussex, earlier this year.
It’s misguided to attempt to measure people’s exposure to misleading content or their “susceptibility” to it, Williams wrote. “And it is extremely misguided to delegate the task of determining which true claims are nevertheless misleading to a class of misinformation experts.”
Political headwinds
While the field has struggled internally with these issues it has also faced an external onslaught from Republicans in the U.S., which many say has had a chilling effect.
Republicans have staged legal challenges contending that misinformation scholars coordinated with the administration of outgoing President Joe Biden to censor legal speech during the Covid pandemic.
A Supreme Court decision last year ruled that the plaintiffs did not have the right to sue over the issue, while leaving unaddressed the central question of whether the interactions between the Biden administration and social media platforms were permitted by U.S. law.
But the attacks have had consequences. The Stanford Internet Observatory, which conducted high-profile work on election-related misinformation, was wound down after being targeted by lawsuits and Congressional subpoenas from Republicans.
Aggressive action against groups working on misinformation and social media platforms is likely to continue. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who has been tapped by President-elect Trump to serve as FCC chairman, has already begun to take action to dismantle “the censorship complex.”
Meanwhile, sensing the sea change, platforms have slowly adapted their approach to misinformation.
Following his skeptical comments in the wake of the 2016 election, Zuckerberg quickly shifted his stance on “fake news.”
In the years that followed he became ever more responsive to pressures to remove problematic content from Meta platforms, culminating in the suspension of Trump following the storming of the U.S. Capitol in 2021.
Since then, the pendulum has swung back in the other direction.
Trump’s profile was quietly reinstated in 2023 with additional monitoring. It was restored in full ahead of the election last year.
Last August, Zuckerberg sent a letter to congressional Republicans expressing regret that Meta had complied with pressure from the Biden administration to censor content related to Covid-19. He claimed the company was “ready to push back” next time.
“Someone like Zuckerberg, he just goes with the flow in power. He doesn’t have any particularly strong political opinions beyond a commitment to wealth and government deregulation,” said Alice Marwick, director of research at Data & Society, a nonprofit research institute.
Elon Musk’s disdain for content moderation on X has also hastened the shift in industry standards and contributed to other platforms cutting back on content policing.
In 2023, YouTube, X and Meta stopped labeling or removing posts that repeated Trump’s claims. YouTube said it would no longer remove videos falsely saying the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.
On Meta’s newest platform, Threads, users have greater control over whether they see controversial or conspiratorial content. Bluesky, the platform currently picking up disaffected former Twitter users, takes the same approach.
Proponents of robust content moderation have criticized the changes, but the policing of political speech was always controversial. When Trump was first removed from Facebook, many world leaders decried the move as censorship.
And some scholars have pointed out that Big Disinfo’s roots, forged in a partisan revolt against Trump, led to glaringly one-sided speech prescriptions.
“Misinformation researchers have not transcended the partisan origins of the misinformation discourse to develop an unbiased and reliable procedure for separating misinformation from true information,” wrote Joseph Uscinski, professor of political science at Miami University, in 2023.
This has resulted in the field’s “inadvertent tendency to take sides in the polarized political debates it attempts to study” and the “asymmetrical pathologization of what we, the researchers, consider to be false beliefs.”
From facts to stories
While social media hasn’t dominated the election post-mortem this time around, misinformation — and discussion of it — has still been a feature. Trump and high profile supporters like Elon Musk have repeated baseless rumors about immigrants eating pets, for example.
Despite the best efforts of the anti-misinfo movement, this kind of rhetoric has gone mainstream since 2016.
“The country’s public discourse has shifted to the right, so you no longer have to look at fringe spaces to hear anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-feminist sentiment, anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ sentiment, that stuff is being espoused by people across the elite,” Marwick said.
But to what extent this can be blamed on social media is still an open question. “Polarization,” once painted as a global crisis stemming from online platforms, now looks more like a product of the highly idiosyncratic political and media culture in the U.S. One recent study found that polarization stayed the same or decreased in almost every other country from 1980 to 2020.
Teasing out the impact of misinformation on electoral outcomes has proved so challenging that the authors of the Misinformation Review piece suggested it “sets up an impossible task for researchers.”
“Lots of people would tell you that it can be done if we had access to the right data or resources,” said one of the authors, Irene Pasquettto, assistant professor at the College of Information, University of Maryland. “I personally believe that this is something that cannot be quantified, not ‘scientifically.’”
Those consulted for this article predicted the field would adapt to encompass emerging findings, possibly with an increasing focus on disinfo campaigns conducted in the global south. At least one faction of researchers has already returned to “foundational frameworks” that predated 2016 in the face of growing criticism.
‘The frame of disinformation has failed us’
At the societal level, the overwhelming focus on whether information is true as the baseline for political analysis is beginning to feel increasingly blinkered.
“I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately … about how the frame of disinformation has failed us and what we can do differently,” Marwick said. “The problem is less about ‘units of facts,’ right? The problem is with these big, sticky stories, and a lot of these stories are hundreds of years old.”
Marwick cites immigrant criminality — such as the immigrants-eating-pets falsehood — and the smear that U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris supposedly “slept her way to the top” as examples of narratives that have persisted for millennia.
“A lot of this stuff sticks, not because the information itself is true or false, but because it ties into people’s common-sense understanding of how the world works.”
So how do you fight narratives? Apparently not with debunking, fact-checking or catastrophic warnings.
The Center for Working-Class Politics studied Harris’ campaign to assess the resonance of different messaging with voters in swing states. “Trump is a threat to democracy” was found to be by far the least appealing message among voters.
“When you adopt this info-centric understanding of voters or news audiences, it really limits what questions you ask about why the right wing is effective,” Peck said.
The post-2016 analysis was “colorless and impersonal” and focused on “tech wizards and Russian bots,” he noted.
Peck studies alternative media, including podcasts, and says persuasion is more likely to come down to “ the host and their charisma and their power and their audience — very human things.”
The idea that U.S. podcaster Joe Rogan “is giving people bad science, and if we gave people good science, we could defeat him … that’s kind of misplacing where Joe Rogan gains his cultural authority — where the trust is between him and his audience.”
“This idea that you give people the best talking points, and you’re the master of the facts,” Peck said. “We need to think beyond that.”
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