[LOCUTOR]

Track thirty-seven, unit sixteen, a drop of ink may make a million think

[PATRICIA KOSSEIM]

[…] So, as you said in your intro to the report, misinformation isn't really a new phenomenon. You wrote "Myths, conspiracy theories, and deliberate deceit are probably as old as human communication itself," yet misinformation, as you say, has become a defining issue of our time. So how did things get so bad?

[ALEX HIMELFARB]

It's not new, but something has changed. In twenty sixteen, Webster Dictionary made post-truth the word of the year. Just last year, Webster Dictionary made gaslighting the word of the year. Something is afoot. So what's happened? The first factor I think is the rise of social media and individual messaging platforms as a major way in which people get their information. A recent survey suggested that about ninety% of Canadians during COVID got their information from social media or messaging apps. And what that means is that they are exposed to vast amounts of information, but also vast amounts of misinformation and almost entirely without mediation, without guard posts, without signposts, without people helping to guide through what's true and what's not true. It also, as you said, creates incentives to create bubbles of self-affirming information. The algorithms and incentives built into social media platforms make conflict, clash, and misinformation much more popular and fast spreading.

Add to that the second big factor, which is decades of declining trust in public institutions and government, but also in the media and in universities and private institutions as well. There's just a declining trust in one another, a declining social trust as well as a declining political trust. Research shows that people haven't really lost trust in the concept of science. What they've lost trust in is the institutions they used to rely on to get scientific information. So they don't believe government the way they used to. They don't believe public agencies the way they used to. They don't even believe universities the way they used to. And media people will tell you they don't believe mainstream media the way they used to.

So each of them finds their own sources often, again, part of these self-confirming bubbles, so unmediated and untrusted. Now you add to that that we live in an age of layered and multiple crises. We have crises of democracy, pandemic crises, democratic crises, crises of breakdown in the social fabric and in times of crisis, people want a degree of certainty that science and scientific knowledge doesn't provide or doesn't provide quickly enough and certainty is hard to come by, but they want certainty and they often want somebody to blame. And that makes us really ripe for conspiracy theories and really ripe for misinformation. You'll put those three factors together, you have a perfect storm.

[…]