Fighting Disinformation

In recent years, the internet has become the venue for a general collapse in trust. Trolling, fake news and doing your own research” have become such a large part of public discourse, it’s sometimes easy to imagine that the online revolution has only brought us new ways to be confused about the world.

- Eliot Higgins

Social media has played a major role in the spread of disinformation. Malicious state enterprises such as the notorious Russian "troll farms" are part of this, but there's a more powerful mechanism: the way social media brings together people, whether flat earthers or anti-vaxxers, who might not meet like-minded folks in the real world. 

Today, if you're convinced our planet isn't round, you don't have to stand on street corners with a sign, shouting at passersby. Instead, you have access to an online community of tens of thousands of individuals producing content that not only tells you you're right, but builds a web of pseudo-knowledge you can draw from if you feel your beliefs are being challenged.

The same kinds of "counterfactual communities" arise around any topic that attracts enough general interest. I've witnessed this myself over the past decade while looking into war crimes in Syria, COVID-19 disinformation, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Why do counterfactual communities form? A key factor is distrust in mainstream authority. For some, this is partly a reaction to the UK and US governments' fabrications in the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Sometimes, it stems from a sense of injustice around the Israel Palestine conflict. These are of course legitimate positions, and are not by themselves indicative of a tendency to believe in conspiracies. But a pervasive sense of distrust can make you more vulnerable to slipping down the rabbit hole.

One way of looking at this is that government deception or hypocrisy has caused a form of moral injury. As with the proverb "once bitten, twice shy," that injury can result in a kneejerk rejection where anyone can be perceived as being on the side of the establishment.