As Election Day approaches, voters are searching for information about the candidates and issues on their ballots. That’s easy to come by in the so-called Information Age; the challenge is how to separate true information from misleading or incorrect misinformation. Worse, we’re also faced with widespread dis-information, or false information that’s deliberately spread with the intention of misleading.
How should we understand the landscape of information, misinformation and disinformation in media and social media today? And what can we do to combat the spread of mis- and dis-information in public discourse?
97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck recently spoke with Shannon McGregor, an assistant professor in UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism & Media whose research focuses on social media in political communication.
Click here to listen to their conversation.
Aaron Keck: What do we know about how voters use social media and how that impacts their political activity, how they vote, and how they interact with politics?
Shannon McGregor: I think the most important thing to think about is that most people don’t use social media for politics at all. So the people who do, tend to be those who are politically interested. And a little bit more on the edges of partisan extremes: more conservative, more liberal than the average voter.
But that doesn’t mean other people don’t come across it, right? So what we know is that this kind of information, especially for people who are not interested and don’t know a lot about politics, can have a bigger impact, because they’re not as knowledgeable about it. Whatever they see can have a big impact on them. This can be good and it can be bad, depending on what the information is.
Keck: So is it misinformation that’s the problem? Or is it just the prevalence of extremism?
McGregor: I would use the term dis-information. This is information that’s false, that’s spread on purpose. Mis-information is when it’s accidentally spread or misleading, but not really on purpose. Most of the election-related false information that we see is disinformation, created on purpose to change people’s minds, persuade them to vote a certain way. We see this mostly being shared from political leaders, political operatives. And as this comes across other people’s timelines, people who are not as politically interested, it can shape what they think is important, and it can shape their behavior on Election Day.
But I think it’s also important to point out that social media is just one place. Many other places [where we get information] have a much greater impact on many more people.
Keck: And social media is a relatively new thing, but disinformation is absolutely not. So what is the prevalence or the impact of disinformation today, versus 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago?
McGregor: I think it’s more visible to more people. Certainly since 2015, 2016, it has really captured the public imagination. But there’s been disinformation about voting and elections in this country basically forever. We saw huge spikes of it after the Civil War, when Black citizens – Black men, that is – were able to vote. Tons of disinformation to try and dissuade them from voting. More recent tropes like the “welfare queen,” this is a disinformation campaign. So none of these things are necessarily new. It’s just that they’re more visible to more people, and [they’ve] also sort of captured the way we think about politics in the last eight years or so.
Keck: So with that in mind – I can go in two directions with this, so I’ll leave it up to you. Question number one that I have is, “okay, so given that this isn’t a new thing, how worried should we really be about it now?” And then question number two: “given the fact that this isn’t a new thing, how have people dealt with it in the past? How have we overcome it, if we have at all?”
McGregor: I mean, I think we should be worried about it now. Not necessarily maybe more than in other times – but one of the reasons that I think it’s so worrying now is that we have people who were elected by spreading disinformation about voting, about elections, about the 2020 election, who [now] seek to take away the power of people to provide a check on them, right? Using the tools of democracy to undermine democracy. That’s not necessarily brand new, but the scale that we’re seeing it now, we have not seen at least for quite some time. So I think that’s one of the things that’s most worrisome to me.
Shannan McGregor (right) visited 97.9 The Hill studios in October to discuss disinformation during election cycles.
Keck: So what can social media outlets do about this? Or what should they do about it?
McGregor: Most social media platforms have content moderation policies about a lot of things, [including] policies about false or misleading election-related information. [But] like all their content moderation policies, it’s very hard to do this well at the scale this is on. So there are mistakes. Another problem is that most of them are only doing this right in the run-up to the election, rather than all the time. And I think that’s a problem.
And one of the other things that I’m not sure that they can do a whole lot about – or at least it’s much more difficult to do something about – is the supply of election-related disinformation. If they were to really take away all election disinformation, that would mean kicking lots of sitting Republican officeholders or candidates who espouse this Big Lie about the 2020 election off of their platforms. That’s a really hard thing for them to do. But that is something that technically does fall along with their own content moderation policies. So it’s a difficult situation that they’re in. They can’t control the supply of it, but they can control the spread of it just in their own spaces.
Keck: What can traditional media outlets do, if anything? Like, I can be the gatekeeper and keep disinformation from getting onto this airway, but is there anything else that we can do here?
McGregor: I think that’s the most important thing. And not necessarily all media outlets are doing that, right?
But the other thing is: I’ve been working with some of my colleagues at CITAP, the Center for Information Technology and Public Life at UNC, and other folks around the country, to try and think about what “democracy-centered journalism” would look like. I think any journalist would say, “Of course what I do is related to democracy. We’re the fourth estate, this is what we’re doing.”
Keck: Like democracy-related versus democracy-focused. Right?
McGregor: Exactly. So, being focused on it means talking about things that we know make people feel more confident in elections, and that are true. Like: free and fair elections have been carried on in this country for hundreds of years, and they’re run well. Election workers are trained people. The sanctity of the ballot has in all recent memory been totally good. Highlighting that it’s just regular people who are trained to do this in their job, while at the same time not giving space or amplifying anyone who would say false things about elections.
Keck: And that there are checks and balances in place if there is any unsavory activity, right? In 2018, there was an issue in a U.S. House race in North Carolina, and it was caught. We had to do a do-over election, but we’ve got a mechanism in place for that.
McGregor: Yeah. Stories that incorporate that rich history of the checks and balances that we have, and of the peaceful transfers of powers that we’ve had, even when the election has been called into question. Most of my students don’t remember the 2000 election, but I’m from Florida, I was 17 that year. The election was contested, it wasn’t decided for a long time, eventually it was decided by the Supreme Court, and there’s still lots of controversy around that – but Al Gore still accepted their decision, conceded the race, and facilitated a peaceful transfer of power. So even in big contested presidential elections, we do have a very recent history of candidates who are pro-democracy, doing what is needed to keep our democracy intact.
Keck: You’ve also co-edited a book called “Digital Discussions,” about how scholars and political actors can use big data to study how people interact with political messages, and how they can potentially target their messages to impact people more. What should we know about that?
McGregor: I think the most important thing you should know is that if you’re not paying for something, then you are the product. So all the actions that we take on social media, and online more generally, are being tracked. That’s not necessarily all bad. It means that we get information that is relevant to us. I think there’s a bit of a moral panic sometimes around micro-targeting. But just remember that political actors can buy this information and use it to target you with – information that you may very well be interested in, but also information that could be designed to suppress your vote, to feed you disinformation. Just be aware of how that data is used and how it’s used to target you.
And I tell people that if you see something, especially on social media, but really anywhere, that makes you either really angry or really happy – that’s the time to try as hard as you can to just take a pause. It’s not necessarily false, but it has been designed to, you know, deeply engage you in that way.
Keck: That’s super-good advice. What else should folks know?
McGregor: Vote. This is the most important thing that we can do. Find information from trustworthy sources, nonpartisan sources, local news. Use your local news, get good information and vote. This is the way that we keep our democracy working.
Photo via Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill.
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