Blog Post 9: Info Blog 1

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Censorship of Misinformation and Freedom of Speech on Social Media

What is the goal of this case study?

This case study explores the role of censorship in misinformation, how the two are linked, and if censorship helps. It also goes over the way misinformation has and hasn’t evolved over time, and what effect social media might have on it.

Discussion:

Questions:

1. This case study discusses several examples in which misinformation appears to be worse now than it was in the past (e.g., vaccine skepticism and election conspiracies). Can you think of any other examples? How confident are you that this misinformation really is worse now?
   • One example I can think of is alternative medicines. Even though there is an increase in the amount of research and data saying that alternative medicine doesn’t work, it seems like more and more people are going down that path. People used to follow these medicines when they didn’t know they didn’t work. As time evolved, they got more and more evidence, and reliance on them diminished. Anecdotally, I feel like recently interest has grown again. That being said, who knows if it is actually an increase - with the increase of availability and people posting on the internet, the actual percentage of people relying on alternative medicines might not have increased. I think this is one of the problems with counting misinformation - since we have more datapoints, the absolute value of people spreading misinformation is probably much greater, but the actual ratio of misinformation probably is the same, or even lower. It is so hard to tell what the ratio of misinformation actually is, and hopefully it has gone down. The article touches on this a bit, but I think it would be interesting to dive more into this.
2. If censorship were likely to be an effective tool in combatting misinformation on social media, would it be justified? Why or why not? And if so, in what cases and to what extent?
   • Censorship is really useful for protecting against hate speech and other forms of harm like that, but it can’t do much against misinformation. Like the article says, starting to install censorship against misinformation leads to unfair censoring of people - if you only let one side speak, even if they are speaking the truth, you completely ruin freedom of speech, and your democracy becomes not that. Even if you have the internet completely free of misinformation, and you make an algorithm that perfectly only gets rid of misinformation, you will still end up ruining your chances of having meaningful debate, which is how innovation gets done. Source The only way to allow for uninhibited development and innovation is free speech, which much involve misinformation, and natural peer corrections of that misinformation.
3. What things can you truly know by yourself, without relying on the trustworthiness of any other people and/or institutions?
   • I am a physics major, and one of the things I love about physics is that we do everything from the first principles. I only need to believe a couple things, that I can measure myself, to be able to understand most of how the world works. It is so freeing to be able to prove yourself why things are the way they are, and not have to rely on others telling you it is true. I also have a good understanding of how cars and other things like that work, as I take them apart myself and figure out how they are put together. I can identify what every component is doing, and if there is something I don’t understand, context clues and the way the object is designed more often than not will be able to tell me what it does. I very much dislike taking information from other people and just believing it, so a lot of my interests and hobbies stem from this desire to figure it out for myself. Thus, there is a lot of information I believe I can truly know by myself, but people guiding me there definitely makes the process easier, like professors in physics class. I think for progress we have to at some point rely on what others say, so we aren’t constantly doing the same research, but we have to make sure the research we are following is trustworthy.
4. What strategies can you employ to avoid falling for misinformation online?
   • I think the biggest thing to do when you are faced with a claim that might be misinformation online is to simply do a search for the statement. If my friend Gordie tells me that the earth is flat, I would search “is the earth flat”, and peruse the results. If there are other sources that back up his claim, I might be inclined to believe him, but if most of the sources say he is completely wrong, I would think twice. Another check to do, even with these sources you find when you search the claim, is to monitor who is saying it. If they have a reputation for doing there own research and making sure every claim they make is correct, I would trust them much more than someone that just starts spewing whatever comes to mind. In the same way, if a new source is known for having accurate and fact checked information, I am much more likely to trust that their article and claim are factual.

My Question:

How can you respond when you encounter misinformation? How can you combat the spread of misinformation without simply censoring it?

Why?

This paper focused on how censoring wasn’t the right way to go about mitigating misinformation, but there was very little on what could be the the right way to do it. Therefore, I am interested in ideas on how to reduce the spread and severity of misinformation, so that we have a better toolkit when our parents repost something, or we see something online. There is clearly a need for some mitigation of misinformation, and hopefully this thought exercise can help find the solution.

Reflection:

This case study, and these questions, made me think about misinformation in my life. I have a lot of people around me that know a lot of things, but I tend to always be weary of what they tell me. I am pretty good at making sure new facts that surprise me are actually true, but a good part of that might be just that I don’t want to be wrong about what I thought. Similarly, the question asking about what I truly can know myself, made me realize how many things I know now that I didn’t learn on my own - even if now I can prove they are true, there was still always someone else telling me what to do. The fact that we rely on peer’s experiences and research so much surprises me. All in all, I think, like many things, the availability of information these days makes every problem seem much worse since we have more absolute datapoints on the problem, and that makes us all more worried. It shines light on the smaller problems, but also makes it feel much more hopeless when we try to solve them.