Scientists find widespread misinformation about misinformation

Researchers find that much of the discussion of misinformation on social media is driven by beliefs that have no factual basis – in other words, by misinformation. 

Misinformation on Misinformation: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges | Social Media and Society - Sacha Altay, Manon Berriche and Alberto Acerbi:

January 28, 2023 - "Alarmist narratives about online misinformation continue to gain traction despite evidence that its prevalence and impact are overstated. Drawing on research examining the use of big data in social science and reception studies, we identify six misconceptions about misinformation and highlight the conceptual and methodological challenges they raise. 

"The first set of misconceptions concerns the prevalence and circulation of misinformation. 

• First, scientists focus on social media because it is methodologically convenient, but misinformation is not just a social media problem. 
• Second, the internet is not rife with misinformation or news, but with memes and entertaining content. 
• Third, falsehoods do not spread faster than the truth; how we define (mis)information influences our results and their practical implications. 

"The second set of misconceptions concerns the impact and the reception of misinformation. 

• Fourth, people do not believe everything they see on the internet: the sheer volume of engagement should not be conflated with belief. 
• Fifth, people are more likely to be uninformed than misinformed; surveys overestimate misperceptions and say little about the causal influence of misinformation. 
• Sixth, the influence of misinformation on people’s behavior is overblown as misinformation often 'preaches to the choir'.... 

Conclusion

We identified six misconceptions about the prevalence and impact of misinformation and examined the conceptual and methodological challenges they raise. 

• First, social media makes the perfect villain; but before blaming it for the misinformation problem, more work needs to be done on legacy media and offline networks. 
• Second, the misinformation problem should be evaluated at the scale of the information ecosystem, for example, by including news consumption and news avoidance in the equation. 
• Third, we should be mindful of the categories that we use, like “fake” versus “true” news since they influence our results and their practical implications. 
• Fourth, more qualitative and quantitative reception studies are needed to understand people’s informational practices. Digital traces do not always mean what we expect them to, and often, to fully understand them, fine-grained analyses are needed. 
• Fifth, the quantity of misinformed people is likely to be overestimated. Surveys measuring misbeliefs should include “Don’t know” or “Not sure” options and avoid wording that encourages guessing. 
• Sixth, we should resist monocausal explanations and blaming misinformation for complex socioeconomic problems. People mostly consume information they are predisposed to accept; this acceptance should not be conflated with attitude or behavioral change. More broadly, conclusions drawn from engagement metrics, online experiments, or surveys need to be taken with a grain of salt, as they tend to overestimate the prevalence of misbeliefs, and tell us little about the causal influence of misinformation and its reception....

"To appropriately understand and fight misinformation, it is crucial to have these conceptual and methodological blind spots in mind. Just like misinformation, misinformation on misinformation could have deleterious effects (Altay et al., 2020; Jungherr & Schroeder, 2021; Miró-Llinares & Aguerri, 2021; Van Duyn & Collier, 2019), such as diverting society’s attention and resources from deeper socioeconomic issues or fueling people’s mistrust of the media even more (Altay & Acerbi, 2022). Misinformation is mostly a symptom of deeper sociopolitical problems rather than a cause of these problems (Ramaciotti Morales et al., 2022). Fighting the symptoms can help, but it should not divert us from the real causes, nor overshadow the need to fight for access to accurate, transparent, and quality information."
Read more: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051221150412
doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221150412

Spotting Fake News on Social Media, WXYZ-TV Detroit, January 28, 2022