Devangshu Datta: Peddling fake news

It is easy for those who understand social media to make a living peddling falsehoods

Fake news (FN) has dominated recent political discourse to such an extent that it has given rise to the coinage of the compound word, “post-truth”. FN had a major influence on the 2016 US presidential elections; the successful candidate repeatedly, openly lied. FN was also a major influence in the UK’s Brexit Referendum; “Leavers” successfully peddled an absurd narrative. FN also influences India’s media/political circus. 

FN is easy to peddle, and hard to counter. The most crucial reason for this is a key feedback loop. Polarised media sources create slanted content. It is consumed by those sharing the same biases. The biases reinforce each other. The consumer of FN never accesses non-slanted media and distrusts, ignores and condemns any fact or narrative, which interferes with preconceptions. 

Such bubbles are created, inflated and sustained by the way social media can be customised to generate “engagement”. This customisation is a natural extension of one of the internet’s original strengths — its ability to foster communities with unusual tastes (aka pipe-smoking nuns).   

Social media (also called Internet 2.0) takes such engagements to new levels of intensity. For example, let us suppose someone worships invisible pink unicorns (IPU), or quantum butterflies (QB). Such an individual can tailor her social media feed to deliver content about these divine beings. Algorithms, like Facebook’s algorithm and Twitter’s “who to follow” suggestions, will then amplify the bubble effect by actively seeking such content and finding other “believers” in IPU and QB. 

Anybody who gets information primarily from social media can live inside a bubble that barely intersects reality. What is more, such a user may even be unaware of the bubble. It is easy for instance, to craft a bubble that excludes everybody who does not believe in IPU. Soon, bubble dwellers may imagine that no other belief system exists. 

Bubbles of this type have always existed. Researchers in universities may focus on problems that seem utterly exotic to anybody who does not dwell in ivory towers. Or, consider how someone in the entertainment hothouse may know everything about fashionistas, while being ignorant of the very names of their own elected political representatives. 

However, unlike during earlier eras, social media bubbles are more all-pervasive. Social media is always on and social media bubbles can be inflated and reinforced at an incredible speed, insulating users within the virtual walls of impregnable belief systems. Even when lies are instantly exposed, as in the case of the US presidential candidate, it takes an effort by the consumer to discover that she is being lied to. If the lies fit with the recipients’ world view, why would they bother to make that effort? Or, if they accidentally encounter the truth, why would they allow it to puncture their bubble? 

Multiple political formations and government agencies have developed paid “influencers” to create such bubbles. Thousands of agents, ranging from the hole-in-the-wall individuals to large operations offer their services to craft social media narratives.   

Those services often edge into the unethical. Some “merely” generate fake “positive reviews” for products and services. Others recruit and create armies of paid trolls and fake bots to insult people, write “negative reviews”, and make specific subjects trend with specific biases. A recent book I am a Troll by Swati Chaturvedi has taken the lid off some of those operations in the Indian context. 

A Gresham’s law of fake news also exists: Fake news drives the truth out of circulation. WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter brim with absurd rumours. Attempting to scotch any of those just disseminates lies to wider audiences. 

Why are falsehoods propagated more vigorously than truth? Some entity always stands to gain from a lie, or more broadly, from the creation of a bubble perpetrating many lies. That entity will pay to create and perpetuate a bubble orthogonal to reality. It is easy, therefore, for those who understand social media to make a living peddling falsehoods. It is much more difficult to make an honest living, by peddling the truth.  

Twitter: @devangshudatta