Real Solutions to Fake News: Why We Need Politics to Solve the Misinformation Problem

In a healthy democracy, citizens rely on accurate information. As voters, we need to know about candidates and their positions to align our votes with our policy preferences. We depend on information about politicians’ performance to hold them accountable at the ballot box. And we need timely news on issues impacting our lives to identify the challenges we want politicians to address.

Misinformation threatens all of this — but not for the reasons commonly held. Conventional wisdom asserts that misinformation poses a threat to democracy because it tricks us into believing false information and that social media is to blame for how it facilitates the creation of misinformation, speeds up its spread, and creates echo chambers for its users.

A couple of factors, however, undermine this narrative. As Aaron Tiedemann points out in a new report from New America’s Political Reform program, misinformation is not a new phenomenon and long predates the rise of social media platforms. It’s also really hard to persuade and change people’s minds when it comes to politics, as recent research has shown. And some of the widely discussed solutions to curb misinformation by tweaking social media platforms do little to curb polarization or change political beliefs. Removing the reshare option on Facebook decreases the amount of political news users are exposed to but has no effect on their levels of polarization. And reducing the amount of content users see from like-minded, ideologically aligned sources doesn’t alter levels of ideological extremism or beliefs in false claims.

So if misinformation is not new and it’s not changing our beliefs, and if tweaking social media platforms isn’t helping much, what is going on?

The Political Reform report forces us to think about misinformation differently. The real problem is not that misinformation is tricking us, but that we find misinformation useful — and why we find it useful may point us towards effective solutions to curb it.

In the United States, we tend to readily consume misinformation because we are, already, deeply polarized. Among OECD countries, the U.S. has some of the highest levels of affective polarization, characterized by dislike or distrust for members of another political party. When our politics are a constant power struggle between one party versus the other and the two parties keep drifting further apart, there is a need to establish a strong ingroup identity while undermining the standing of the other party.

Misinformation helps us do this. It provides confirmation that our group is the “good one” and the opposing group is the “bad one.” For partisans, misinformation helps signal group loyalty and status while making members of the other party look bad. That’s why those who express the most outgroup hatred are the “most likely to share political fake news and selectively share content that is useful for derogating [opponents].”

At the root of the issue are our electoral institutions. The winner-take-all system in the U.S. has resulted in a two-party system that clearly demarcates the ingroup versus the outgroup, the winners and the losers. Because losing an election in this system completely shuts parties out of power — unlike in proportional electoral system — the costs of losing are quite painful. Making things worse, political identities have become so intertwined with many other identities, that when a voter’s party loses an election, it feels personal and hurts their standing relative to the opposition. It becomes convenient and more comforting to seek out misinformation that questions electoral results or disparages the other party as cheaters than to come to terms with an electoral loss.

Once we consider why we want fake news and why misinformation is so useful in a highly polarized society, we start seeing misinformation, its implications for democracy, and possible cures to the problem differently:

• As voters seek and share misinformation to gain status, politicians and news organizations will provide that type of content at the expense of accurate information on vital policy issues that could actually improve our individual wellbeing. Fringe and fabricated issues — like schools making accommodations for students who identify as cats — end up gaining more attention than public problems that affect us all like affordable housing, childcare, and inequality. This can short-circuit channels of electoral accountability, resulting in further dissatisfaction with the government and eroding trust in the state.
• There will always be misinformation. Rumors, lies, and conspiracies have been around since time immemorial, but what determines the health of the #FakeNews market is whether that misinformation is useful for voters to gain status and for politicians to connect with voters.
• Eliminating misinformation won’t solve our political problems. If we were to magically eliminate misinformation today, we’d still be a polarized nation and we’d still have extremist candidates and people voting for them. Our political problems come from our political institutions.

Interventions to reduce misinformation, like fact-checking, media literacy, and changes to the algorithms of platforms, are necessary stopgaps and we need more research on how these play out. But we also need to keep our eyes on the politics and deepen our understanding of how political reforms might affect misinformation. To address the root causes of misinformation, our efforts should be focused on making misinformation less useful to voters, politicians, and media companies. That requires structural and institutional changes like reforming our electoral institutions to move beyond the winner-take-all system and reduce the current us-vs-them mentality in our politics.

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