Want to Disrupt Disinformation? Stop focusing on training people to be more careful and critical when evaluating news and social media. It won’t be effective. A thread, with a pessimistic start and a hopeful ending. 1/17

I have nothing against any of the work on how to correct misinfo or teaching people to recognize disinfo campaigns. These approaches may help people avoid a single piece of misinfo and new disinfo campaigns. But these approaches will not work in our current situation. 2/17

The Problem? These approaches assume people encounter just some false info and a lot of true info. Generally they focus on getting people to reject a few false bits. We have a problem of ecological validity. 3/17

In reality, people are being flooded by false information in serious disinformation campaigns. You can see my argument in a recent article at Psychology Today. 4/17 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mental-mishaps/202101/why-disinformation-campaigns-are-dangerous

In the election disinfo campaign, for example, the false argument was everywhere. It was spread by President Trump, his campaign, almost every republican, the conservative news media, social media. For a conservative, there was no escaping the disinformation flood. 5/17

In that blog post, I make two critical arguments. First, critical thinking won’t help. Instead, it will confirm the misinfo in a campaign like this. Almost everything they see is consistent. The truth is inconsistent, and doesn’t fit. So it will be rejected. 6/17

Partly, this reflects the observation that people care about these ideas. The misinfo is consistent with their world view, an argument that Maddy Jalbert @MaddyJalbert and I made a few years ago. 7/17 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211368117301997?via%3Dihub

But more importantly, I worry that we (all of us concerned with training people to be better at recognizing and rejecting false information) are making a fundamental attribution error. 8/17

Quick reminder. When a person makes a decision or performs an action, we can attribute the cause to something about the person or something about the situation (it’s always both). The fundamental attribution error is the bias to focus on the person, ignoring the situation. 9/17

Expecting people to be able to reject false info, when it is part of a serious disinfo campaign and when it is consistent with their world view probably reflects an attribution error. We are blaming the person. We try to fix the person. Give them new techniques. 10/17

But the real problem is the context. They are living in a world that is based completely on misinformation. Misinformation that tells a coherent story. If we want to change the thoughts and decisions of people, then we have to change the information environment. 11/17

Instead of leaving people in a information ecology based on false information, we need to disrupt the flow of disinformation. And this leads me to my optimistic view. I now see signs of hope. 12/17 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mental-mishaps/202101/when-twitter-banned-trump

Since the attack on the US Capitol, many social media and internet companies have de-platformed some of the people who have been the super-spreaders of disinformation. Not just Trump, but several others and many QAnon accounts. 13/17

And this is something important. Much of the flow of misinfo and disinfo goes through a few accounts on the internet. See this great thread on new work by Kate Starbird and her team. 14/17 https://twitter.com/katestarbird/status/1347572962317144065?s=20

Removing a few accounts, those that repetitively share misinformation and that have lots of followers, can disrupt the spread of disinfo campaigns. Pull the super-spreaders out of the disinformation ecosystem. 15/17

So my conclusion? Stop blaming individuals (yes they have some responsibility). Start focusing on the situation, on the context. Disrupt the flow of disinfo on the internet. 16/17

Of course, we’ll also need to address news media. Responsible news sources need to stop centering liars. Change the information context. Stop blaming the individuals. I think this gives us a hopeful direction. 17/17