2.4: Social implications of mis/disinformation

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Professionally dressed people pulling out their mobile phones. (Unsplash free-to-use license; Camilo Jimenez)

One of the primary effects of the global spread of misinformation and disinformation is a decline in trust, not just of media institutions but of all kinds of social institutions. Institutions are formally recognized, human-made social structures such as governments, health care systems, educational systems, military, police, religions, etc. They are powerful, but they are not immune to attacks. Most institutions are legally recognized sources of power. How they wield power is open to scrutiny. In fact, holding them accountable is one of the main purposes many nations protect freedom of speech and of the press in their constitutions. Reasonable skepticism of institutions is healthy for societies. For all their shortcomings, institutions provide necessary services that enable societies to function. The spread of mistrust through mass audiences can contribute to collective confusion and violence. This can lead to a breakdown of institutions and ultimately threaten social order.

Wrecking the social order in a given society might sound like the fastest way to meaningful change. Some of the most successful nations on Earth arose through revolutions against colonial powers, but the violence brewing around much of the globe today favors existing power structures and may only serve to give more authority to relatively oppressive nations or structures within nations. When some institutions are threatened while other institutions, primarily that support those already holding the bulk of the power, are bolstered, this is an indication that people are working to consolidate power and control. Historically speaking, tightly consolidated, controlling power is one of the things people have rebelled against the most.

Right about now, readers may be asking, "What does this have to do with media writing?" In the context of accuracy and fighting mis/disinformation, this is the "why."

People may elect to make their societies more or less open in terms of trade and social norms. They may choose to elect leaders who are more or less interested in centralizing power, but if citizens are making electoral and advocacy decisions based on misinformation and disinformation, they are not making freely informed decisions. They are living in state of constant manipulation. Free and open media systems, and the people who work in them, should consider attacks against media systems and other institutions to be existential threats. 

You may ask yourself, "How did we get here?"

Persuasive speech, including fact-based speech, misinformation, and disinformation have existed and been studied for as long as philosophers have examined rhetoric, but mis/disinformation in a networked society is a phenomenon most of us are not prepared for. Fighting misinformation and disinformation is difficult because they spread rapidly through social networks and other digital platforms. Additionally, misinformation and disinformation often include emotional appeals, which can circumvent our powers of reason. Despite these facts, it is the responsibility of mass media professionals to be aware of the damage mis/disinformation can do and to fight it with a commitment to ethics using the tactics outlined in the previous section. The rest of this section covers a case study of how mis/disinformation can have global, national, and local implications.

The case of COVID

To quote a late-2023 analysis published in Time magazine, "Misinformation is Warfare." The gist of the article, written by Joan Donovan, an expert in the use of networked communication technologies to spread mis/disinformation, is that social media users have been drafted into a war of information influence and that it is everyone's responsibility to fight for the truth. The position mass media professionals find themselves in is that they have all of the capabilities and responsibilities of average social media users coupled with the power to amplify messages for mass audiences in ways that extend message reach and depth. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, mis/disinformation about vaccines contributed to the deaths of 300,000 people. That loss of life is staggering.

Though preventable, COVID deaths due to vaccine misinformation are not entirely the responsibility of professional news organizations, advertisers, or PR professionals, they underscore what is at stake with mis/disinformation, and they boost the argument that mis/disinformation in networked communication systems is not a topic for detached discussion and post-hoc analysis but rather an ongoing battle that surrounds us and that can permeate societies down to the individual level.

At the global level, many societies grappled with misinformation and disinformation when the virus first started to spread. The study cited in the previous sentence notes that although the proportion of people who believed misinformation about COVID in the early days was usually a minority, those who did believe in misinformation were much more likely to disregard safety measures.

The study, which examined populations in the UK, Ireland, United States, Spain, and Mexico, published by Jon Roozenbeek and eight other scholars of psychology and neuroscience says, "Across all countries surveyed, we find that higher trust in scientists and having higher numeracy skills were associated with lower susceptibility to coronavirus-related misinformation. Taken together, these results demonstrate a clear link between susceptibility to misinformation and both vaccine hesitancy and a reduced likelihood to comply with health guidance measures, and suggest that interventions which aim to improve critical thinking and trust in science may be a promising avenue for future research."

According to Google Scholar, more than 1,250 academic articles have cited that paper as of June 2024, but academic research related to mass communication is most useful when media writers put the guidance into practice. In a global sense, confusion spread by misinformation and disinformation are a call for media writers to use and to encourage critical thinking among audiences. Journalists and other media writers will not stop mis/disinformation from being created, but they can counter misleading messages through fact checking. They can reiterate fact-based information in promoted posts rather than waiting for social media algorithms to elevate their carefully researched reports above other content on social platforms, and they can hold the corporate owners and managers of social media accountable for allowing misinformation and disinformation on the platforms they own and/or control.

The World Health Organization dubbed COVID-19 an "infodemic" because misinformation was spread widely and led to an increase in risky behaviors that led to deaths.

Definition: Infodemic

"An infodemic is too much information including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak." Source: The World Health Organization

Two medical scholars, Farooq Azam Rathore and Fareeha Farooq of Pakistan, recognized in a commentary piece published early on in the COVID-19 pandemic (May 2020) that on a global level misinformation was leading people to try "miracle" cures and other unsafe approaches to dealing with the threat. They noted that COVID was the first global pandemic to hit in the internet age and found that boredom during lockdown coupled with easily available massive flows of information led to information overload around the world. Along with other advice, they suggested media consumers limit themselves to one or two pandemic updates per day. They suggested that healthcare professionals refrain from sharing large PDFs and slide presentations full of information. Consumers as well as many healthcare professionals were already overloaded with pandemic information and did not have the bandwidth for this level of detail.

They supported direct-to-consumer text messaging services that countered false COVID claims in real time, and they lauded news reports of healthcare professionals making sacrifices to try to stop the spread. In future crises, not necessarily as large as a global pandemic, mass media companies could develop targeted text message apps and services. They could encourage healthy media habits with a maximum of one daily update on days when there are no major shifts in the crisis. This could be applied during hurricane season, earthquakes, localized epidemics and more.

Story Time

The film "Contagion," 2011, directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Scott Z. Burns, predicted several issues that would arise less than 10 years later with the real-life COVID pandemic. Themes that appeared in the film that were also prevalent during the worst years of the COVID outbreak included difficulty figuring out the origin of the pandemic, the respiratory nature of the disease and disease transfer, the fact that symptoms vary widely for different people who contract the disease, the spread of misinformation and false "miracle" cures online, inequality in access to vaccines, and significant shifts in lifestyle, although in the fictional film there was greater civil unrest which went along with a much higher mortality rate.

If "Contagion" was intended as a warning about "not if, but when" a pandemic hit the globe, global leaders and members of the general public did not seem to take core lessons to heart. One key takeaway is that factual information can be difficult to promote, even if lives depend on it, if the message is something people do not want to hear.

Perhaps this explains why "Contagion" has one of the widest splits between critics' and audience's ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, although both groups rate the film above 60%, i.e. the threshold for "certified fresh."

On a national level, U.S. major news media coverage of COVID was found to be more negative on average than coverage in international media outlets. This is according to a study by economists Bruce Sacerdote, Ranjan Sehgal, and Molly Cook. Negative coverage and negative language choices can influence the psychological state of mass audiences. Two scholars in India, Shakshi Priya Giri and Abhishek Kumar Maurya, suggested that negative news coverage "may generate various negative emotions which may have a detrimental effect on people's mental health and may also put an adverse effect on an individual's ability to be resilient in these conditions."

Locally, in every media market, this translates to journalists balancing the need to warn people about the threats of major, long-running negative events without hyping up the language or threats of death. When it comes to covering misinformation and disinformation about chaotic events as they unfold, journalists, advertisers, and PR professionals must carefully weigh whether or not to address misinformation in its own terms.

For example, medical research shows Ivermectin is not useful for reducing COVID symptoms, but media professionals may refrain from covering this study heavily or promoting their coverage much because, for some audience members, the fact that the drug is mentioned in mass media outlets might reinvigorate their desire to buy and hold it and try to treat COVID symptoms with it. Ivermectin is a useful anti-parasitic drug, but misinformation made it popular with people looking for "secret" or "miracle" cures. Many would pay top dollar to obtain it, which made it difficult or even impossible to procure for patients who truly needed it during the worst of the pandemic. 

In an age of massive, networked flows of information and threats of misinformation and disinformation spreading even more virally than a deadly global virus, developing skills and strategies for quashing false information might be as important as developing skills to research and deliver popular information for mass audiences in the future.