Learnings on the Online Post-Truth World

This quarter, I was in a class called “Ethics in a Post-Truth World” with Professor Liataud. It was a wonderful class that covered topics ranging from identity to government to tech all viewed from the lens of Truth and adjacent concepts like Authenticity, Memory, Belief.

My final paper was on how the post-truth world applies to our use of social media and the rise of misinformation and disinformation.

Here are some thoughts I laid out in the paper, “Finding Truth Online: The Erasure of Truth and the Rise of Misinformation and Disinformation”:

Social media algorithms allow inflammatory ideas to thrive and cause fake news to be spread virally.

“In this virtual world, reactions and shares determine the success of social media posts. Information warfare capitalizes on how we as humans react more vociferously to inflammatory ideas, because they are often more exciting than the simple truth. We share misinformation and lies more readily and this tendency is amplified on social media. Steve Lohr wrote in The New York Times that people “prefer false news. As a result, false news travels faster, farther and deeper through the social network than true news”. Lies get spread at an alarming rate and can transform a whole community’s ideas before the truth is even known.  With no regulations of social media, truth has little power to disprove a lie and may never fully erase the lie from some corner of the internet and its community. “

Behave online as you would in person.

“ While it is easier to sacrifice truth online, bending and manipulating truth precludes any claim to ethical internet use. Insofar as we believe we are held to some sort of moral obligation to be good, that obligation still applies online. We cannot simply separate our online selves from our offline selves and create different standards for those two personas. “

Policy must be adapted to enforce truth online. It should not be the user’s onus to identify truth.

“It is imperative that we as a society rethink how truth must be practiced online. While part of the onus is on us to be skeptical users, much of information warfare is simply beyond what the casual user is able to identify. Malicious technology and the complexities of social networks make it difficult and labor intensive for an individual to track down the truth behind an advanced misinformation attack. Technology and policy must be adapted in response to our post-truth and information warfare world.“

Possible avenues to improve the toxic media environment:

“Engagement is easy when there is high emotion around a post. To counter this trend, engineers of social platforms must rethink which content should gain visibility based on how people interact with it, such as using sentiment analysis around the post’s comments and shares to evaluate how the post is perceived on the platform.”

“Additionally, there are steps that can be taken to ensure the authenticity of a source and its author. Using trusted science, data, and policy-backed sources, ideas in a post can be marked with what is factually untrue or that may be contested by other sources. Cross-channel tools must be utilized to disclose where ideas originated and how the content propagated to mainstream social media, so that users can decide if they trust not just the source they are reading, but the original source. Beyond the mysterious “blue checkmark” verification system, platforms must work to verify an author's expertise or background.”

“ The government has much work to do to ensure that technology companies are responsible for the consequences of how their users are using their platforms, as currently the technology companies are simply renouncing all responsibility as suits them legally. Part of the policy actions required will be government regulation of the largest tech companies, examining issues such as data transparency and content moderation.”

“In addition, the government can encourage companies to spend resources on fighting information warfare to adjust the fiscal saving incentive for them not to. Another step may be a movement to elect more representatives with technical backgrounds. While a purely technologically minded government would give us just the same issues as Silicon Valley has, having some technology perspective in the government allows policy to be guided by a knowledge of how algorithms are developed and what innovations can be made in the space. “