One of the greatest driving forces behind the rise of “fake news” has been the digital age’s increasing separation of information from its provenance. We no longer know where the information we consume came from or the context of its creation nor do we even appreciate why that loss is so devastating. Today a photograph from Syria taken 30 years ago can be recaptioned as a protest in Venezuela 30 minutes ago and go viral, with few paying enough attention to recognize that the clothing, architecture, vegetation and ubiquitous Arabic signage is not typically found in Latin America. As we are increasingly separated from the production of the information we consume, what does this suggest about the future of our trust in information?
Perhaps the greatest harm to our informational lives wrought by the web is the way in which it has deemphasized the concept of understanding where information comes from. The web outsourced information access and authoritativeness to algorithms and the public and prioritized speed over accuracy. We no longer care where our information comes from or even if its right, we just want something now.
The web has had a tremendously positive impact in vastly expanding society’s access to information. Its decentralized redundancy has made it progressively harder for the repressive governments of the world to restrict or even delete information.
However, this duplication of content meant that we could no longer prove that a document was what it claimed to be. A speech by a prominent head of state might be republished on thousands of websites and excerpted tens of millions of times across social media. However, without a central authority authenticating each copy, there is no guarantee that none of those copies has been secretly modified to add or remove content.
In the early days of the web there was little incentive for such mischief but as the web increasingly commercialized, the battle for impression- and click-driven ad revenue meant the creation of false content was increasingly incentivized.
The loss of our traditional gatekeepers meant there was no longer any semblance of verification of the information we were now consuming. Rather than going to a library and being referred by a knowledgeable reference librarian to a professional research resource that has been thoroughly vetted and with the reputation of its publisher on the line, today we do a web search and click on the first link that comes up. We no longer care who wrote it or why or whether it cites any sources for its conclusions, we just want something, anything, fast.
The explosion in authorship has meant the voices we hear from no longer may have any expertise or experience in the topics they write about. Rather than a world-renowned expert’s introduction to a scientific topic, we have a random person who read a few conspiracy blog posts about it and then creates a website to propagate those false rumors.
The web taught us to judge the quality and reputableness of information by the quality of its visual presentation. An academic website put together by experts in the field but displayed on a 1990’s-style website will be viewed as less reputable than a slick Apple-style website that was built by a scam artist using an off-the-shelf WordPress template.
Making matters worse, as the web has transitioned from the desktop to mobile devices, their small screens, coupled with the infinite scrolling of the modern web, means we no longer even typically bother to fully scrutinize the URLs of the sites we visit. In fact, we no longer even read the content we share with others.
The limited interfaces of smartphones largely constrain us to the content we are consuming at the moment. Cross-referencing the details of a story and researching its images is typically beyond what we can easily achieve on our phones while walking down the street.
We are increasingly casual consumers of information, reading material during breaks and on the go, where the emphasis is on relieving an informational itch, rather than answering a material question. At work speed typically trumps accuracy.
As the mobile era in turn gives way to the voice era, we are becoming ever more detached from our information. The voice interface removes our natural ability to browse, forcing algorithms to decide what is most reputable. The ability to communicate disagreements and conflicting information is also much harder in voice interfaces, such as to present a user with four different possible answers. As the fact checking community reminds us, users today just want "the answer," they don’t want choices and aren’t interested in the details, they just want to be told what to believe.
In information science we talk about the reasons people consume and share information. One of those reasons is “social capital” and the desire to be the person others look to for the latest information. The web’s always-on nature and rapid-fire updates mean it is more important to be first than to be right.
Even journalists are increasingly rushing stories out the door based on incomplete sourcing when they can’t verify any of the details or have even confirmed elements of the story to be false, just so they can be first. In the past a retracted story was a major blow to an outlet’s reputation, but today it is just the cost of digital journalism. The ephemeral nature of online publishing means news outlets can even rewrite their coverage as new facts become known to ensure they there is no trace that they ever made a mistake in their reporting. Outlets no longer even typically even acknowledge that an article has ever changed.
Most worryingly, in the aftermath of major events today, social media accounts posting footage or details claiming to be from the event are inundated with press requests from major news outlets requesting permission to republish their content. The desire to be first means journalists are no longer willing to spend hours or even days verifying such reports, they just grab whatever they can find on social media and run with it, rewriting their coverage down the road to write out any errors they make.
The anonymity of the digital era has also normalized the idea of blindly trusting others. We increasingly trust information we find online that agrees with our beliefs even as we ridicule others for the same practice. Twenty years ago an anonymous flyer arriving in the mail asking recipients to mail cash to an untraceable bank account in a foreign country to assist an unknown charity would likely go straight in the trash. Today an anonymous Twitter account can claim to be a rogue group of government workers asking for donations to “resist” the democratically elected government and suddenly scientists, professors, engineers and other elite academics suspend their disbelief and freely promote and donate to a shadowy Twitter account that has sprung out of nowhere.
While we like to think that higher education immunizes us from “fake news” and that having a doctorate degree somehow makes us able to discern falsehoods on the internet, the popularity of the “Rogue Twitter” accounts among the research community remind us that education alone does not make us immune to falsehoods.
To truly combat fake news, we need to restore provenance to the digital world. For every word, image and video, we need to be able to know the entire chain of its digital existence from where and when it was created to the full chain of custody through its reaching our hands.
Provenance has the additional benefit of affording us access to alternative perspectives.
The most common form of “fake news” circulating today is not deliberately falsified content, but rather very real imagery and video taken out of context. Many a viral video has turned out to depict something very different than first believed, after further video emerges capturing other vantage points and the events leading up to the story in question.
We need to teach our society to question everything they see online and to never share or take action upon any piece of digital information until they have conducted at least rudimentary verification on their own. Most importantly, we need to teach the public the importance of provenance and why it matters where a piece of information came from and the path it took to reach them.
As our information consumption is increasingly recentralized to social media platforms, we have an ideal opportunity to reestablish provenance by having those platforms track where and when a given piece of information first entered their informational ecosystem, whether that entrance point was unusual and whether the trajectory of that information among those with connections to the event or location in question matches that of previous verfied information. Providing all of this detail to users as they consume a piece of information would go a long way towards helping us decide how much to trust what we see online.
Putting this all together, centralized gatekeepers, human fact checkers and algorithmic verification can only do so much to combat the spread of false information.
In the end, for us to truly combat disinformation in the digital world, we need to teach the public how to think critically about information and where it comes from.
