When facts are unpleasant & variable
Industrial-scale disinformation and partisan media bubbles lead to increasing aversion to fact-based reporting as opening up to inconvenience, hardship, or uncertainty.
One of the great mysteries of the last 10 years of American politics has been the increasingly outspoken aversion of tens of millions of Americans to information and news sources that prioritize facts and evidence. At the same time, virtually everyone is using existential rhetoric about their need for more access to truth and authenticity.
We know the biggest driver of this trend is industrial-scale disinformation, which is made possible by social media algorithms that incentivize rage-clicks. The more outrageous an assertion, the more attention it will get. Worse, because major social media and internet companies make money from advertising, there is immense reward for the deliberate prioritization of dubious claims.
But we know this, so why is it working?
During the first Trump administration, there was a somewhat playful exploration of “truthiness” by some comedians and media critics. The idea was that people are more willing to accept claims of fact that “feel like truth” than they are to simply engage with and assimilate actual facts. It turns out there was something to that joke. People do actually prefer claims that feel right to them, and they will support candidates for public office that defend that feeling by spreading those claims.
But there is another layer to this. The world was that way before industrial-scale disinformation through social media. What has changed is that tens of millions of people no longer engage with reporting from professional news services that are not filtered by the disinformation engine of their social media network. This has a particular effect on our relationship to facts.
If you are not getting facts from the news you read—or the headlines you glimpse in passing as you scroll through your bot-crafted self-referential social media feed—then your primary relationship to facts tends to be in the form of money and weather, and other unpredictable but unpleasant things like traffic, taxes, ill health, and various kinds of loss.
If we look at just money and weather, we can see pretty far into the psychology of what makes people choose “truthy” and right-feeling messages on social media over evidence-based reporting of facts, be they about political events and laws or about scientific research and evidence.
Money as fact: For most people—even for many who have six-figure incomes or better, money is not a pleasant part of their experience. Income is depleted too easily for tens of millions of people, and even large fortunes can be decimated by shock events or stock market crashes. Since 2008, even those with accumulated wealth have seen money be less of a friend than a problem, and the vast majority of working Americans struggle to save any money after bills are paid. 65% of the middle class are struggling economically and have come to believe they will throughout their lives.
Weather as fact: Weather is one kind of fact you cannot refute. When it rains, you get wet; when roads freeze, they become slippery and dangerous; hurricanes and tornadoes, and in recent years firestorms, can destroy entire towns. But, weather predictions are not always accurate. Though better and more detailed and precise than ever, there is still room for error, and so people experience weather as both inconvenient and also variable. This does not help to build an affinity for facts and evidence, especially when your personal information ecosystem is full of right-feeling “truthy” claims that bolster your worldview and give you a sense of certainty and stability.
We should all be well-versed in critical thinking and able to read facts and evidence, to sift through dubious claims and trace the contours of a truthful accounting of our world. This particular part of the everyday life of informed citizenship has been devalued over the last several decades, however, as technology has gained space in the core skillset everyone needs to navigate everyday life and professional spaces, and nonstop hyper-partisan political messaging has not helped.
A few major changes might help remove the incentive to invest heavily in disinformation:
Reversing the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Citizens United case, which unleashed unlimited sums of money on the American political process;
Curtailing gerrymandering of Congressional districts designed to ensure only one party is likely to win election in a given area;
Establishing ranked-choice voting as the standard across the U.S., to give voters using reason, values, and judgment, rather than extreme messaging, greater ability to decide who serves.
Ultimately, we will also need information sources that can penetrate the “truthiness” bubble that so many are stuck in. This could be part of a negotiated approach to allowing tech platforms to remain content neutral and not directly liable for claims made by users. In exchange for keeping that unique privilege, tech platforms could be required to exempt professional newsrooms from limitations on their reach which would be imposed by algorithms.
How that might work is a complicated question, but politically motivated interference with Americans’ access to factual reporting has become too easy and too lucrative. The Bill of Rights requires individuals be able to access the information they need to engage in self-government. That—not the privileged power to bombard people with falsehoods—is what protects individual liberty and basic rights against tyrannical forces.