Debunking disinformation - 3 Quarks Daily

by Paul Braterman

DBH2020-EN-Thumb The Debunking Handbook, 2020, free download, 12 pages loosely laid out text with diagrams and flowcharts, 22 authors spanning 20 institutions on 3 continents, 108 references.¹

This brief booklet is well worth your time. It has persuaded me to change my strategy in dealing with disinformation, and misinformation in general.

Misinformation is sticky, and continues to affect people even after they have been told that it is incorrect. I would add that the misinformation that persists in social media has undergone a process of Darwinian selection, either natural selection, or, in the worst case, artificial selection by algorithmic fine tuning. For this reason, it is better to pre-empt, by getting in first with good information, rather than starting off by presenting the misinformation and then refuting it. It is still possible to unstick disinformation after it has taken hold, but this requires the repetition of detailed and convincing argument.

We are subjected to misinformation, disinformation, and fake news, and the repetition of misinformation produces an illusory truth effect. Disinformation is misinformation spread with malicious intent, while fake news describes the stream of misinformation, online and in partisan media, that masquerades as genuine news. The illusory truth effect occurs when the fake news becomes so familiar, or fits in so well with pre-existing beliefs and attitudes, that it ends up being accepted as reality.

Simply telling people that misinformation exists can increase their awareness of it, and this can be reinforced with examples. Thus knowing how the tobacco companies manufactured a spurious uncertainty about the effects of their product makes it easier to spot the very similar tactics being used by the fossil fuel companies.

Skepticism about media, in combination with instructions about fact checking and comparing different sources, is something that can, and should, be taught.

What of misinformation that has taken hold, and how can it be debunked? If the misinformation is not going to be widely shared, the best thing to do can simply be to ignore it. Otherwise, however, it is best to get in first, provided our own presentation is clear and sticky. To choose the authors’ own example, it is good strategy to talk about the enormous success of vaccines in eliminating diseases, rather than discussing bogus claims of harm.

Debunking requires establishing one’s own credibility, and undermining that of the misinformer, according to criteria that appeal to the misinformation’s target audience. For this reason, when arguing against creationism I deliberately cite, and identify, Christian sources, and point out that the creationists’ claim to speak for their faith is warrantless.

I had been concerned about the backfire effect; the risk that very fact of repeating misinformation will reinforce it, but recent studies show that this had been much over-rated.

The booklet suggests a general routine for dealing with pre-existing disinformation: Fact; Warn about the myth; Explain the fallacy; Fact once again. A clear and detailed description of what is the case; a single short statement of the erroneous claim (avoid unnecessary detail, which would enhance its credibility); dismantling of the error, with particular attention to logical fallacies (so that the audience can apply the same reasoning to other circumstances); reiteration of fact, because the last part of a discussion is what is most readily remembered.

For example, I can point out the facts that the Wuhan immunological laboratory is 10 miles away from the Wuhan wild animal market, and on the opposite side of the Yangtze, that the first reported cases of Covid-19 clustered round the animal market, and that we already know of viruses jumping from animal to human hosts. Then I might mention the conspiracy theory that the virus leaked from the lab. In rebuttal, I would point out that the components that combined to form Covid-19 were not even under study in the lab, and I would conclude by saying that they have, however, since been identified in wild animal populations.

Misinformation on social media should be corrected by collective action, rather than passed over in silence, and here much can be accomplished by influencing onlookers.

Avoid technical language. Do the necessary work to break down complex ideas into simple components. (Here, the authors have been much more successful than I have been in my summary of their arguments.) Use visual aids to get your point across.

The authors conclude with an illustration; debunking one of the most common arguments used to deny the importance of climate change. Fact; scientists observe human fingerprints on climate, as shown by multiple measurements, and the crucial fact that the lower atmosphere is warming while the upper atmosphere is cooling. Myth, stated briefly and once only; climate has always been changing naturally, therefore the present change is also natural (I have often seen this argument on social media). Fallacy; assuming that what works in one case operates in all others. This is like denying the evidence of a murder, on the grounds that people die naturally anyway (a sticky and emotive example, identifying the nature of the fallacy). Finally, reinforcement of the statement of fact, felicitously chosen in this case to illustrate the relevance of the example; climate scientists are operating in the same way as forensic scientists, establishing the actual cause of an event using specific relevant data.

Reading this material has changed my own approach in three significant ways. Firstly, I have become much less fearful of spreading misinformation by refuting it (of course, I would still avoid sharing misleading sticky memes and images). Secondly, when dealing with misinformation, I will present only the briefest possible summary, before beginning to dismantle, in order to avoid unnecessary point-by-point repetition. Thirdly, I will be much less likely to use the rhetorical strategy of spelling out the objections to your own position in order to dismantle them.²

The first two points are illustrated by my decision to mention the Covid 19 lab leak theory, and how I dealt with it. The third I would illustrate by reference to Darwin, who is much admired for the care with which he lays out the objections to his own ideas. This is laudable in the context of non-partisan debate, and much to be commended while developing one’s own intellectual program, but not within the raucous cacophony of online post and counter-post. Take one famous passage in On the Origin of Species (1859), on the evolution of the eye:

“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances… could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

In his very next two sentences, Darwin points out that such commonsense impressions are misleading, that natural selection would favor the inheritance of useful variations and that

“…then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.”

Here he is conceding in advance the commonsensical objection that biological complexity seems too great to have arisen naturally, before using that same objection as a launching pad, and implicitly outlining a research program that, in the intervening years, has proved enormously successful. This does not however prevent the first sentence being repeatedly quoted online in isolation, and despite the warning word “seems,” as evidence that Darwin himself regarded his own theory as absurd.

Darwin had to deal with fierce opposition, and with the skepticism quite properly aroused by radical new ideas, but he did not have to deal with the Internet.

Footnotes

1
Lewandowsky, S., Cook, J., Ecker, U. K. H., Albarracín, D., Amazeen, M. A., Kendeou, P., Lombardi, D., Newman, E. J., Pennycook, G., Porter, E. Rand, D. G., Rapp, D. N., Reifler, J., Roozenbeek, J., Schmid, P., Seifert, C. M., Sinatra, G. M., Swire-Thompson, B., van der Linden, S., Vraga, E. K., Wood, T. J., Zaragoza, M. S. (2020). The Debunking Handbook 2020. Available at https://sks.to/db2020. DOI:10.17910/b7.1182
2
This is sometimes formalized as “Rappaport’s rules of debate,” popularized by Daniel Dennett in his 2013 Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking; state your opponents’ position better than they could themselves, emphasize areas of agreement, say what you have learned from them, and only then move on to criticism.