Researchers who study misinformation are confronting a new problem: public scorn. And it’s not just in the form of online trolling. These scientists are losing funding, watching their research centers close down and getting barraged with subpoenas.
Given the rapid changes to news, social media and information sharing, you’d think there would be more support for studying how people learn about the world. Instead, critics are wrongly conflating their work with censorship.
In the New York Post, for example, a story hammered a group of psychologists as concocting “fake science” to justify censorship. It’s easy to see why their paper, published last week in the journal Nature, hit a nerve. The researchers found that conservatives shared more information from low-quality news sites on social media than liberals did.
While the idea of news quality sounds subjective and prone to bias, the scientists didn’t make that judgment themselves. They asked three groups to weigh in: professional fact-checkers, a politically mixed group of laypeople and a group of Republicans. Each group determined what was a high-quality source (a news organization that mostly gets it right, but can sometimes make mistakes) or a low-quality one (a publisher that tends to make things up out of whole cloth).
After each group determined what counted as low-quality news, the team looked at who typically shared that type of news. Each time, they found that extreme partisans on both sides were more likely to share this misleading content. And each time, those on the far-right contributed more garbage to the information effluent.
The study doesn’t justify censorship of conservative views, although it does offer an explanation as to why right-wing social media accounts are more likely to be suspended. It shouldn’t be attacked just because it’s offending people. That flies in the face of the spirit of free inquiry.
Edward Tenner, a historian and lecturer on technology and culture, explained to me that the pushback against the paper could be what’s known as reactance — a tendency for people, when told they’re wrong, to double down. Adding to that is the problem that many people don’t mind lies — they only abhor lies spread by their political opponents.
Tenner considers the relevance here of the Italian saying, “Se non è vero, è ben trovato” — even if it is not true, it is a good fabrication, or good story.
The expression might describe the way JD Vance reacted to Donald Trump’s statement that immigrants in Ohio were eating cats and dogs. There were no documented incidents of such activity, but Vance attempted to justify the rumor by saying that it called attention to problems surrounding immigration.
“Part of the research that we’re doing right now is to develop models so that we can evaluate intended and unintended consequences of different moderation schemes,” said Filippo Menczer, a professor at Indiana University. But these efforts have gotten much harder due to political attacks. Meta and X have also restricted data access to many researchers.
Picking fights with scientists won’t make our information problems disappear. A more consistent view for those who are pro-free speech and anti-censorship would be to embrace free inquiry into our information ecosystems — and to applaud those who scrutinize the algorithms that influence what we think and how we vote.
F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science.
