It became fashionable a few years ago for people to blame “misinformation” for others holding views they find wrongheaded. Social media platforms, sometimes jawboned by the federal government, invoked this supposed crisis to justify censorship, especially during the pandemic. This insulted the intelligence of the American people, who can make up their own minds without being told what to think.
A new study explores how exposure to “misinformation” on social media affected voters in 2020. The answer, drawn from a three-month experiment on nearly 16,000 users, is very little.
Academics received rare access to internal data from Facebook and Instagram. They considered “problematic” content anything posted by sources that Meta’s third-party fact-checkers had repeatedly flagged for spreading falsehoods. That material turns out to have reached a small, self-selected audience that had already made up its mind.
Stripping it from their feeds for three months changed what they believed by approximately zero.
Three companion experiments from the same project made other large changes to what users saw in their feeds, and none of these interventions moved beliefs either.
The hysteria around “misinformation” assumes democracy runs on unvarnished truth. It doesn’t. It runs on persuasion, with rival camps making their best case to loud and stubborn voters, under procedures everyone can accept.
Political scientists established long ago that people have always leaned toward voting along their identities and loyalties. The era of machine politics did not destroy the republic, nor will social media. Those hell-bent on defeating “misinformation” are trying to re-create a system that never really existed.
The challenge today is that social media supercharges the factionalism that has always plagued the body politic. Rather than serving as a conduit for information, it becomes an echo chamber. Users choose whom they interact with, which typically means gravitating toward like-minded people. This is why anti-vaccine activists thrived on platforms like Facebook.
Newspapers play an essential role in reporting facts and publishing opinions, but the mainstream media’s gatekeeping power has diminished in recent decades amid declining trust across institutions.
Combating this problem, however, was never going to be as simple as taking down inaccurate content. The trouble with fighting “misinformation” is that someone must be a final arbiter of truth, and the fight over who gets to play that role ends up politicizing everything.
That’s why the best response to false speech, however odious, will always be more speech. The American system depends on vigorous debates forging public sentiment. Stifling unpopular ideas usually backfires.
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