Why Misinformation Is Here To Stay

There is an important development that is shaping and will continue to shape the media landscape in 2023 and beyond: The proliferation of fake news. Digital technologies increasingly allow the spread of real information and content, but also of content that can appear to be real but it’s really not. Is it here to stay, or can it be eliminated or at least controlled? I think the answer is no, but there is a potential long-term solution to alleviate the problem.

Fiction and Fiction

Regarding media as creative content, there are substantial developments in AI-enabled technologies that enable the creation of unreal content that looks very real. For example, there are major advances in the creation of deepfake photos, audio, and videos that look real and in the meshing of recorded scenes with virtual sets.

For entertainment, this is actually a good thing. The more a manufactured or re-touched scene in a movie or game resembles a real or fantastic scene, the better it is. The problem is that, unfortunately, these same technologies that enable fiction and fantasy for entertainment can be used to dupe consumers.

Falsehoods and Distortions

Fake news is an increasingly used term to refer to shared falsehoods. But it is used rather loosely, so perhaps the more technical terms of misinformation and disinformation can help break down the problem.

Misinformation is false or misleading information. In the past, spreading misinformation was more difficult through traditional media channels like radio and TV, because there was a more controllable and predictable media space where credible curators and journalists could prevail.

With the advent of social media, the media space has become a wild, wild west and a fertile ground for misinformation. In the internet, anyone can claim to know the truth, even fake people and fake bots. Falsehoods and distortions of reality, whether in video, audio, or text, can spread like wildfire. Even though most social media platforms are not professional or reliable sources of news and information, more than half of consumers use social media as a source of news. I have argued that to address the problem, social media platforms should not promote themselves as a source of news.

Notice that misinformation includes misleading information, which is particularly concerning because a partial or distorted picture is disguised under a partial reality. I have been researching this phenomenon in digital business under the concept of transparency strategy. Businesses can choose to selectively reveal and distort information to maintain an advantage over their rivals. For example, savvy marketers will bias information to highlight the merits of products and services but hide the weaknesses. Social media has become a very effective lever to deploy transparency strategies.

The term disinformation brings an important nuance to the problem: the intention to distribute misinformation. Disinformation campaigns deliberately attempt to create and spread falsehoods or distortions. Many individuals inadvertently fall in the trap of participating in disinformation campaigns, by sharing false or misleading content that looks genuine and credible.

Is Misinformation Here to Stay?

An important prediction that matters for media companies and businesses in general is whether biased and distorted information will prevail across digital platforms. I have taken a stab by predicting whether or not consumers who desire to get the full, real picture will prevail over those who want to push false, biased, and distorted information in their favor.

Supply side prediction. My research with Alok Gupta and Rob Kauffman suggests, in a nutshell, that the more competitive is an industry or market, the more transparent the information will be. But because the value of social networks lies in how big the networks are (also known as network effects), the industry will continue to develop in oligopolistic fashion, where a handful of platforms get the lion’s share of the market, such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok, and Instagram in the U.S. Social media companies will continue to ‘newsfeed’ us what we want based on our clicks and browsing behavior, as they use their market power to weed out innovators who try to introduce business models based on transparency.

Demand side prediction. What if we get smart enough to decipher what is true and what is false, biased, or distorted, and we then demand fact-based content? I am not very optimistic. First, it’s easy to get sucked into reading news on these platforms. For example, 78% of Facebook users end up reading news on the platform even though they were not intending to. Second, to top it off, we are dangerously overconfident when trying to ascertain facts, fiction, and falsehoods. A recent study shows that three fourths of Americans are overconfident when it comes to distinguishing between legitimate and false news headlines, and the higher the overconfidence, the higher will be the tendency to share news while relying on untrustworthy sources.

Education: The Light at the End of the Tunnel

Misinformation will increasingly be part of the reality in the media industry and to conduct business in general. In response, a burgeoning industry dedicated to fight misinformation is looming. Given the gullible nature of consumers, I am not optimistic about community-based systems that flag misinformation, like Twitter’s recently introduced Birdwatch. Rather, AI-enabled techniques to combat misinformation are more viable because they can be scaled to handle the massive task at hand.

One way to revert the trend in the long run is by educating the younger, digitally savvy generations so they are able to critically consume content to distinguish between facts, fiction, fantasy, and falsehoods, and to think like researchers who evaluate multiple sources beyond social media and acknowledge their biases in the process. This also seems like an uphill battle, because the more digitally savvy you are, the more overconfident you tend to be about your ability to distinguish facts from fake news. When using digital devices, 42% of Americans ages 18-29 get news often from social media sites, compared to 15% for ages 50-64. And then, ironically, research shows that when you share a news post via social networks, you become even more confident about its veracity, even if you haven’t read it.

Social media companies just don’t have enough incentives to attack misinformation to its demise. At the least they should caution consumers about using their platforms as a news source. On the business side, the duty will fall on companies across industries to develop training for employees to flag and fight misinformation. For society, high school and university educators have a big task ahead of them to train our new generations to think critically and to have an investigative mindset when consuming online content. It is not a short-term battle, but a long-term war that we need to wage against misinformation.