Fighting Falsehoods

Suspicion, Analysis, and Response

Irene Rubin

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000608021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Periodismo

This book offers the reader tools to recognize, analyze, and fight back against the fake news, misinformation, and disinformation that come at us from every corner.

This volume:

• Uses real, lively examples to help readers detect fake news, false claims, suspicious information/data, biased reporting, and hate speech;
• Demonstrates through case studies where to look for information, what to look for, how to analyze the logic/illogic involved, and uncover the truth value of a story;
• Discusses fact-checking sites, what they examine, and their reliability;
• Provides examples and analyzes the components, purposes, and consequences of conspiracy theories;
• Illustrates the tricks of using numbers/data to mislead readers;
• Explains what to look for to help decide whether to believe the conclusions of stories based on surveys;
• Offers a range of concrete, effective responses to dangerous, exaggerated, distorted, and false narratives;
• Examines policy responses to fake news, disinformation, and misinformation across the world.

A key manual to negotiate the information age, this book will be essential reading for students, scholars, and professionals of journalism and mass communication, public policy, politics, and the social sciences. It will also be an indispensable handbook for the lay reader.

1 Suspicion, Analysis, and Response

DOI: 10.4324/9781003298472-1

What Is the Problem? Exaggerations, Distortions, and Lies

John Adams, the second president of the U.S., observed that “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” Adams was right when he claimed that facts are stubborn things, but he did not anticipate the extent to which we are pressured to ignore facts and evidence, to substitute instead “our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions.”¹

On television and websites, in newspapers and magazines, in email and on billboards, and in ads and solicitations that come in the mail, companies, politicians, interest groups, and individuals try to convince us about something. They may want us to buy a computer or vote for them in the next election. They may advise us to buy their pills to lose weight or urge us not to vaccinate our children. They may tell us that global climate change is not occurring, or if it is, it is perfectly natural, and we should not take any steps to moderate it. They may warn us that the government is coming to take our guns, or that immigrants, artificial intelligence, or robots are after our jobs. Some of the many messages aimed at us are well intended, some are true, or at least not disprovable, while others are intentionally misleading.

Intentionally misleading material is becoming more common and efforts to combat it have not been able to keep up. The deceptions are becoming harder to detect. The threat to democracy has become apparent. On January 6, 2021, a group of Trump supporters, many armed, broke into the Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes for Joe Biden, who had defeated Trump. The mob had accepted Trump’s false claims that he had won the election, and that the Democrats had stolen it from him. The fundamental principle of democracy that leaders shall be chosen by free and fair elections was directly attacked by people who accepted a false claim.

The columnist, Margaret Sullivan, declared that America was not losing but rather had already lost the war against disinformation. She was referring to a viral video by a group of doctors endorsing misleading information about a treatment for covid-19. The doctors were promoting hydroxychloroquine, which had been shown in controlled studies to be ineffective. One of the doctors in this video had attributed various diseases to dreams, demon sperm, and alien DNA. Sullivan argued, “With nearly 150,000 dead from covid-19, we’ve not only lost the public-health war, we’ve lost the war for truth. Misinformation and lies have captured the castle.”²

My opinion? We have not lost the war yet, only some of the preliminary skirmishes. But Sullivan is right that truth itself is being challenged.

The consequences of failure to fight back are almost unimaginably serious. How can we live in a society where there is no truth, where uninformed opinions substitute for evidence, where advertisers are free to make false claims, where candidates for office and public officials routinely mislead the public, and where there is no credible way of countering lies, misstatements, and exaggerations?

We need to arm ourselves and take action. In the play Cyrano de Bergerac, Cyrano had an imaginary sword with which to cut down lies. The goal of this book is to give readers some real weaponry and show you how to use it, so that recognizing and attacking falsehood becomes easy, automatic, and gratifying.

The Problem Is Serious

The frequency and impact of distorted information has been called “truth decay.”³ Truth decay occurs when the line between opinion and fact is blurred; when the volume and influence of opinion and personal experience are greater than that of facts and accumulated knowledge, and when trust in traditional sources of factual information erodes.

While false or misleading information is not new—President John Adams certainly recognized it—it has blossomed in recent years. The problem is not limited to political actors trying to influence an election or doctors endorsing an ineffective cure. Individuals publish their own unproven versions of events. They create believable but false evidence by distorting voices on recordings and altering pictures and videos. Search engines pick up altered or made-up stories, and news media repeat them. Some are even endorsed by the president. Fake news is cheap to produce, often financially rewarding, and abundant; by contrast, verifying information requires time and skill and doesn’t earn a cent. But failure to recognize and combat false, misleading, or distorted stories hurts both individuals and society at large.

Threats to Individuals

For individuals, consequences of fake news can include embarrassment, loss of money to false advertising and fraud, loss of employment, illness, and even death.

Embarrassment

In its mildest form, failure to detect misleading claims can be embarrassing. I knew a woman who claimed that she had won a lottery because she received an advertising brochure from the Publishers Clearing House that said, “You may have already won ten million dollars!” She looked foolish to her friends who understood that what she had received was just an advertisement. The chance that she had won the sweepstakes was vanishingly small. People who have been taken in by scams often are too embarrassed to report the crime to the police.

Financial Loss

Failure to detect omitted evidence or missing steps in an argument can be expensive. If you buy a used car and fail to ask for certification that it has not been in a flood that ruined the vehicle, you may buy a lemon and waste your money. You may have to take the bus to work. Those who cannot recognize Ponzi schemes that promise unrealistic rates of return on an investment may lose their life savings.

Loss of Employment

Sometimes people who fall for false or misleading stories lose their jobs. A police officer in Louisiana read a statement falsely attributed to U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), “We pay soldiers too much.” He became angry and posted on social media that AOC deserved a round [of bullets]. In the ensuing uproar, the officer was fired. The officer apparently never asked himself if the quotation might be false.⁴

Impact on Health

Failure to ask oneself whether a claim is true can have a serious impact on health, one’s own, that of one’s family, and that of one’s neighbors and friends.

As long as there has been a vaccine to prevent the spread of disease, there have been anti-vaxxers. In recent years, the number of people who will not vaccinate their children has dramatically increased. Measles, which had been largely eradicated in the U.S. by 2000, returned with a major outbreak in 2019.⁵ People who do not get vaccinated keep a disease alive, and spread it to others, including the young, the old, and those with compromised immune systems.

Advocates of the rice diet for weight loss failed to warn people that the more rice they ate, the more likely the diet would trigger diabetes. As recently as May 2017, Doctor Michael Greger defended the rice diet, arguing that it had saved tens of thousands of lives by lowering blood pressure and treating kidney failure. He failed to mention anything about the connection between eating too much rice, particularly white rice, and the development of diabetes.⁶

Possible Death

In the worst case, failure to question claims about cures for diseases can even lead to death. An article in BBC Three, in the United Kingdom, reported that a young woman’s boyfriend, diagnosed with a return of his cancer, refused a second round of chemotherapy because of its side effects. He opted for alternative cancer treatments that had been touted on YouTube videos, in documentaries, and in speeches. They promised to cure cancer “naturally.” The young man chose a vegan diet, with coffee enemas and cannabis oil. The proposed treatments came with a thermographic scan that was supposed to show if the cancer had returned but could not actually detect cancer. Thinking his disease was in remission because it did not show up on this test, the young man had no effective treatment and died at age 23.⁷

The young people, eager to latch on to some hope, never checked to see if what they were hearing, watching, and reading, was true.

Closer to home, in March of 2020, a man died, and his wife was in critical condition after taking chloroquine phosphate to prevent covid-19. In tests, the drug was associated with a risk of potentially deadly heart arrhythmias, but apparently the couple never checked.⁸

Threats to Society

For society at large, false or misleading information can result in the failure to deal with health or environmental crises, can cause the erosion of democracy, and can increase divisiveness and violence. Researchers who produce false or misleading results and those who circulate those studies influence, support, or obstruct critical policy decisions.

Climate change has already begun to increase the intensity of storms and the frequency of floods and droughts. Life-threatening heat waves are occurring more often, glaciers are melting, raising sea levels, threatening low-lying islands and cities along the coasts. Climate change is contributing to reduced harvests, creating pressure on food supplies. Wildfires in California have increased in frequency and area, an increase attributed to climate change.⁹ A handful of scientists who deny the existence or importance of global climate change reinforce political decisions to take no action to moderate its effects.

The social costs of failure to see through false claims include going to war on false pretenses. For example, unjustified claims of a linkage between Iraq and Al Qaeda contributed to the rationale for the U.S. to go to war against Iraq. Claims that Saddam Hussein was creating weapons of mass destruction were questionable and were later disproved.¹⁰

False news can stir up hatreds and fears between groups, and can even be the impetus for killing sprees, as occurred in India when nationalists were subjected to false news about Muslims killing sacred cows.¹¹

Democracy is threatened by false news when it is used for political advantage. If citizens cannot distinguish between what is true and what is false, they cannot monitor and control government policy and implementation. They would not know for whom to vote, or what policies to approve or oppose; they would not know what programs were successful in solving public problems, and which ones were failing, costly, wasteful, or corrupt.

Believing Nothing Is Not an Option

If you realize how much of what you hear and read is false or exaggerated, it is easy to fall into thinking that nothing is true. No one wants to fall for a made-up story told by a panhandler to get a bit of money or a fraud perpetrated by a scam artist. But the alternative, not accepting any story or any claim, means that you also turn away the genuinely destitute and let them freeze or starve, or send them back into situations in which they are likely to be murdered. If you believe that government programs are riddled with errors and overpayments, you oppose all programs that help people in need.

If you assume all candidates are liars, you will not vote, instead letting others less knowledgeable than you choose the president. Your choice probably would have been better than theirs, not just for you, but for your city, your state, and your country. If many people throw up their hands and withdraw from political participation, if they do not vote, if they pay no attention to politics, democracy dies, without a bang or a whimper.

When there is a real danger, and government or private agencies warn you about it, you do not flee from the hurricane or tornado because yo...