Are you misinformed?

“People often are not uninformed about policy, as political scientists continue to emphasize, but misinformed.” *

Our topic on my master’s course this week was misinformation. I was looking forward to juicy details about how bad actors get fake news out, evidence of people paying for misinformation campaigns, stats about the rising tide of falsehoods and how it’s damaging democracy.

Turns out, I’m misinformed about misinformation.

The problem is not people telling us things that aren’t true.

It’s us leaping to conclusions.

We don’t like not knowing, so we fill in the blanks for ourselves. We guesstimate.

We assume we know the answers. And because we’ve told our brains we know things, our brains believe us.

“Once people store their factual inferences in memory, these inferences are indistinguishable from hard data.” *

Worse, unless you are confronted with clear evidence that you’ve got your facts wrong, you’re unlikely to take in information that runs contrary to your beliefs.

So you act based on dodgy data.

Whatever hot topic of the day you’re talking about, from the budget, to immigration, to something your local council is doing, check your facts, even if you think you know the answer.

I was quite shocked by this research.

Maybe it’s only one paper, I thought.

Then I read the next one: “…public discourse about social media has been shaped by the assumption that platform algorithms are the primary cause of exposure to false and extremist content online … although algorithms indisputably shape the content people see, we interpret recent empirical evidence as suggesting that, on average, these algorithms tend to push users to more moderate content and to offer extreme content predominantly to those who have sought it out.”**

Well, that’s me told!

There’s a lot more I want to share but it belongs in a different post.

My main takeaway from this week, without wanting to give anyone an existential crisis, is question your beliefs. I’ll certainly be looking at sources for some of mine.

If you want to do some fact checking then fullfact.org is a good place to start.

* Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship by James H. Kuklinski, Paul J. Quirk, Jennifer Jerit, David Schwieder and Robert F. Rich, published in The Journal of Politics , Aug., 2000, Vol. 62, No. 3

**Misunderstanding the harms of online misinformation by Ceren Budak, Brendan Nyhan, David M. Rothschild, Emily Thorson and Duncan J. Watts published in Nature 630, 45–53 (2024)