Start by listening
Sometimes my mother shares it, too, she said. I was chatting with a smart, articulate young woman from the University of San Carlos last week about how communities can rise above the flood of fake news on social media, when her comment brought me up short. How do you help someone deal with disinformation, when it comes from or is spread by a parent she has trusted all her life?
Disinformation, the deliberate creation and spread of false content, harms us by supplying us with poor information on which some of our decisions could rest. It is an obviously bad idea, like building a house on weak foundations, though disinformation has existed for at least a century. It harms us further by potentially damaging some of our professional or personal relationships. On an intellectual level, we can pretend that political differences don’t matter. And, except for some bedrock issues like respect for all human life, they shouldn’t.
Until we catch someone spreading lies, when we expected them to do so much better. Even when we don’t unfriend or unfollow anyone who makes no apologies for sharing disinformation, we’ve probably had to reconsider our opinion of them, our tribal instincts kicking in.
When the student brought up the matter of her mother, I panicked and suggested that she share the usual advice. This is how the usual advice starts: Check the source, then check the source documents and interviews. First, find out if the story comes from a person or organization with a track record for sharing truthful, verified information. If the source looks legitimate, then find out what the story rests on. Are there multiple, named sources? Does the story cite public records and links to documents you can also review? Expect bias, which all humans possess, but demand objectivity in the source’s methods of gathering information.
Obviously, I avoided the issue at hand. How are you supposed to tell your own mother to stop empowering liars? (I don’t have this problem, my mother being well-read, discerning, and on the same side of the political fence I find myself in.) I do know of some friends or families who’ve decided, for the sake of peace and togetherness, to ban all talk of politics at the dinner table or in social gatherings.
An article published by NiemanLab last Thursday helped. It’s based on an ethnographic survey of 72 American adults and how they read news reports about their President Donald Trump. In it, Northwestern University Professor Pablo J. Boczkowski identified four mechanisms these individuals used when reading about this controversial figure.
One of his observations was that while individuals do filter (for example, by unfriending or unfollowing certain social media contacts), some made it a point to curate their news sources “in such a way that includes multiple perspectives.” Strategic curation was what Boczkowski called this. A second mechanism was mindful processing. “When the reliability of a piece of information was in question,” he wrote, “in particular if it was an important story, many interviewees tried to double-check its veracity by triangulating with other sources.”
One common assumption of these times we live in is that personalization has narrowed our choices of where to get information. And to some extent that’s true. Platform companies, using algorithms, serve us the content that matches our browsing histories. Yet Boczkowski’s observations offer hope: some people (though we don’t know how many) still invest the time and attention to check whether what they’re reading is true.
“Emotional interpretation” and “subjective attachment” are the two other mechanisms at play that the researcher found. Boczkowski observed that even when people were overwhelmed or exhausted by all the stories about Trump and the outrageous things he has said, they remained “critical and sentient,” thinking and feeling, not just passively receiving.
“Reading the news on Trump: Are we empty vessels or active filters?” yielded what I ought to have told that young student. Start by listening. Ask your mother, as gently as you can, why the stories she shares matter to her. Ask her why she believes them. Assume she has the best intentions. Attempt to understand her without trying to change her mind.
(@isoldeamante)