'How do you solve a problem like misinformation?' by Ryan Calo, Chris Coward, Emma S Spiro, Kate Starbird and Jevin D West in (2021) 7(50) ScienceAdvances comments
Understanding key distinctions between misinformation/disinformation, speech/action, and mistaken belief/conviction provides an opportunity to expand research and policy toward more constructive online communication.
Trying to navigate misinformation about COVID, climate change, politics, and countless other topics can be overwhelming. This is true for the public, researchers, journalists, and policy-makers alike. As researchers dedicated to the study and resistance of misinformation, we often find ourselves in conversation with government officials and others trying to understand and address the phenomenon. To help illuminate the complexities of misinformation and to guide policy, we find three distinctions helpful: misinformation versus disinformation, speech versus action, and mistaken belief versus conviction. Failing to appreciate these distinctions can lead to unproductive dead ends; understanding them is the first step toward recognizing misinformation and hopefully addressing it.
The first key distinction covers misinformation—erroneous or misleading information to which the public may be exposed, engage with, and share—and disinformation. Disinformation refers to a purposive strategy to induce false belief, channel behavior, or damage trust. Misinformation is usually discrete or standalone, as when a neighbor shares a false rumor or overhears a misleading exchange. Disinformation tends to take the form of a multifaceted campaign with a predetermined financial, political, or other objective. Disinformation campaigns blend orchestrated action and organic activity, relying on the participation of willing but unwitting online audiences. ...
Fighting misinformation is about identifying and addressing misleading messages. It is conceivable that a machine learning system could help flag misinformation or that legislation could define it. However, fighting disinformation is another matter. It is an exercise in disentangling the motivations of the various actors, some innocent and sincere, others strategic. The warning signs for a disinformation campaign may, ironically, involve true information and reasonable opinion. This suggests a need for researchers to follow people and strategies, rather than individual content alone, and for legislatures to address the problem at the level of incentives. The best way to address a foreign disinformation campaign, however, may be diplomacy and economic sanctions rather than artificial intelligence or tort law reforms.
A second distinction is the legal difference between speech and action. The U.S. Constitution protects free speech; however, it does not necessarily protect deceptive speech coupled with harmful action. This distinction potentially removes barriers to accountability for social media platforms that fail to address misinformation. Laws could require procedural safeguards and reporting about misinformation without censoring speech or treating Facebook or Google like a publisher. At a minimum, the assertive steps taken by technology companies to address coronavirus misinformation from warnings to outright deplatforming demonstrate potential methods to counter harmful content that has long plagued the internet.
We can and should ask more of internet platforms to address the conditions that they helped create and profit from, but what does the law say? The U.S. Constitution prohibits the government from censoring speech, even if the speech is misleading. Federal law (Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act), meanwhile, immunizes platforms like Facebook and Google from liability for speech on their platforms that originate from sources outside the company. Yet, neither the Constitution nor federal law grants legal protections for harmful conduct just because the action involves speech. For example, in striking down the Stolen Valor Act in 2012, which penalized lying about receipt of the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Supreme Court afforded states the power to criminalize fraud based on such a lie, and indeed, Congress passed a new version of the Stolen Valor Act the next year, with a requirement that lying about the medal had to be for the purpose of material gain for it to be criminal. In other words, the government can regulate doing things, or failing to do them, even if those things involve speech. ...
The final key distinction relates to the nature of belief itself, specifically, the difference between a mistaken belief and a conviction. We recognize that the distinction between belief and behavior is a subject of enduring interest in the social sciences. Indeed, one of our team’s primary research questions examines how exposure to misinformation translates into both belief and behavior. Yet, the distinction between beliefs held out of mistake and beliefs held out of conviction remains undertheorized in both the research literature and within policy circles.
