We ended last year with an exploration into fake news, the alternate reality conservative donors constructed, and the potential of technocognition as a solution. But is it as bad as all that? Maybe not, according to some new studies.
A new study released late last month and covered by the New York Times Tuesday uses the media consumption of 2,525 Americans to find that while the older and most conservative users were by and far the biggest consumers of fake news, even their media diet was primarily real news. The study shows that a quarter of its participants went to a fake news site in the weeks around the 2016 election. However, stories from those fake news outlets constituted only 1% of Clinton supporters’ media viewing, and only 6% of Trump supporters’ news clicks. We may be living in a fake news world, but, if this study is indicative of a larger whole, we are mostly consuming the real stuff.
Less rosy was the study’s finding that no participants rarely sought out fact checks for the fake news they found--even when Facebook (the platform the study found to be the biggest provider of fake news links) flagged the fake news and offered a fact check.
But this assumes people actually want the truth, and not just talking points that prove themselves right and their Twitter enemies wrong. Between this study showing their greater use of fake news and others showing their greater susceptibility to bullshit, more and more academic work shows that conservatives are rejecting fact checks for tribal reasons, not intellectual. No fact check can change an opinion that’s defined by partisan positioning.
And no partisan positioning, particularly on climate, can be changed by fact-checking when there is a cottage industry perpetuating the falsehoods. There’s a difference between silly politically-themed clickbait written by Macedonian teens for ad revenue, and deliberate misinformation to fit a political or ideological narrative, funded by billionaire industrialists and pushed into the media with the same tenacity and mendacity as a multi-level marketing scheme.
Just ask Jerry Taylor, currently at the Niskanen Center but formally of the climate-denying, Koch-founded CATO institute. While at CATO, there was a time he toed the party line on climate. But when called out for his faulty talking points, he actually did his due diligence, and realized that when it came to the supposed skeptics’ talking points, he “was being fed garbage.” Now he calls denier’s garbage for what it is.
If everyone in your tribe occasionally looks at garbage and calls it cuisine, you might do so to fit in, though you’re apt to search out something better. But if certain “chefs” are paid handsomely to plate that garbage like it’s food, then Facebook happily serves it up and says all your friends are eating it, you might start to doubt yourself.
With an entire industry of “think tanks” who otherwise fit your ideology are funded to convince you that garbage is food, and you see your preferred politicians with the garbage in their mouth, someone pointing out that it’s garbage isn’t going to change your mind. It will only make you eat more, if nothing else than out of spite for those who would dare tell you your tribe’s food is fake and you’re an idiot for not recognizing the garbage in your mouth.
Beyond finding a way to pull the plug on denial’s funding, it’s hard to see a way around this politically motivated, industry-backed fake news. But what we can do is improve our own messages to the public.
That means not sugar-coating the risks. According to another new paper, climate communicators shouldn’t shy away from the crisis, but face it honestly, show its impacts locally, and offer solutions to give people hope.
In other words, serve up something more appetizing than fake news garbage.