Disinformation is not an anomaly: implications for the electoral context

Thales Lelo

Despite the diversity of research streams developed in recent years focused on the study of disinformation, particularly in response to the rise of far-right populism around the world, it is important to note that the majority of recent scholarly literature – from social epistemology to political psychology and media studies – is based on a concept of disinformation understood as an anomaly or noise capable of disrupting communication well-functioning.

That body of work relies upon an ideal that we interact with each other in a strictly rational manner, exchanging information intentionally and extracting true knowledge regarding the world around us. So, disinformation would be a type of noise deliberatively created to deceive an interlocutor, generating false beliefs about the reality surrounding him. In macro-social terms, it is claimed that we are in trouble in the age of digital platforms due to the industrial scale of production and distribution of disinformation by political actors and opportunists of all kinds. It assumes that just as we need good information to make the best decisions about our lives and the lives of those who matter to us, in a collective aspect, it is critical that, in a democratic government, citizens are adequately informed about the public facts in order to judge their rulers’ actions rationally. As a result, a democracy besieged by disinformation would be a weakened democracy. 

The problem with that dominant framework is that it presupposes that we act as disembodied information processors in everyday life, motivated by overly demanding rationality criteria that are sometimes not applicable even to scientific research. Information is meaningless unless it is accompanied by a situated and socially determined context that serves as a backdrop. That context includes facts available for individual perception and the stories we tell each other that are deeply rooted in our shared imagination, regardless of how closely they correspond to “pure and simple” reality. Through those stories that are loaded with values about people and the world around us, we manage to give meaning to an absolutely complex social life. The potential deception of a disinformative message can be estimated less in terms of its distance from facts and more in its ability to elicit shared expectations that give us a sense of stability in our daily lives. In political terms, this claim implies that citizens care about concrete data about public-interest issues in the same way that they care about the narrative appeal of the stories that pervade major events in their community. 

To be more precise, I contend that the limited efficacy of several measures to deter disinformation proposed in recent years, ranging from fact-checking to media literacy initiatives, stems from a concept of human rationality that is insensitive to its practical foundations. In the following, I would like to list some implications of my argument for the type of work developed by those enterprises: 

 It is not enough to debunk untruths: Several studies have shown that simply correcting disinformation is insufficient without providing the reader with an alternative and more convincing interpretation of the story evoked by it. It is naive to assume that people will stop considering the “background” prompted by certain messages simply because the events depicted do not correspond to the truth, especially when the statements are wholly detached from the available evidence. This observation applies, in particular, to stories that touch on values that are important to a given community, such as family, religious, ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual relationships.

Political campaigns are not only about facts: Citizens do not make their voting decisions solely based on the number of lies or truths a candidate tells. Correcting the statements made in a debate in real-time, for example, does not change this situation, especially in disputes involving saboteurs who parasitize democratic institutions, such as Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Jair Bolsonaro, and Giorgia Meloni. For this reason, initiatives to face disinformation must acknowledge the inseparability of facts and values in the public sphere while also addressing the social world interpretations steeped in a factually distorted statement.  

It is necessary to differentiate between degrees of imprecision: Authoritarian populists worldwide have been working to internally undermine the trust expectations people place in their statements as representatives of an elected democratic government. There is a significant difference between factually inaccurate statements in statistical and chronological terms, which are common in political campaigns, and claims that bend reality to reinforce a shared imagination. Initiatives to combat disinformation run the risk of implying false equivalences between cheaters and politicians by failing to state these differences explicitly.

Disinformation cannot be eliminated from the public sphere: False stories predate the age of digital platforms and will endure into the end of it. Since disinformation is not an anomaly or noise, the information ecosystem will not be “sanitized” despite the good intentions of journalists, fact-checkers, legislators, and educators. We will not go back to a time when people made their decisions based on the best available evidence because that historical period never existed. At best, initiatives to deter disinformation will continue to be reactive to the very agenda of false stories spreading socially. Nevertheless, they can be more careful not to amplify the imagery evoked by fake news and rumors that are seemingly absurd on a strictly factual basis.  

To summarize, as long as we continue to support an understanding of disinformation as an anomaly, we will be condemned not only to reiterate a model of rationality that is insensitive to the practical foundations of human action but also to reproduce an intellectual elitism that treats citizens as naive, manipulative, ignorant, or cynical. 

Thales Lelo is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sao Paulo with a grant from The Sao Paulo Research Foundation. He is a member of the Communication and Work Research Center and the author of “Journalism in Transition: Reports from a Struggling Profession” (Mercado de Letras).

This op-ed is part of the project “Global Democracy Frontliners: Transnational Research Coalition for Tech Accountability and Democratic Innovations Centering Communities in the Margins”, funded by Luminate.