No impact to disinformation. People don’t base decisions off news.

DW Akademie: You published a research paper that concluded: "Alarmist narratives about online misinformation continue to gain traction despite evidence that its prevalence and impact are overstated." How did you come to this conclusion?

There is certainly a 'fake-news' and 'misinformation' hype that started after the 2016 US presidential election [which Donald Trump won] and Brexit [when the UK voted to leave the European Union in a referendum]. Most observers didn't see Trump and Brexit coming and were quick to blame misinformation and people's gullibility for the election of Trump and Brexit. To be fair, there was misinformation surrounding these events, but many jumped to the conclusion that because there was misinformation, it must be misinformation that caused these events. And I think that's wrong, the data doesn't support it.

Many think that misinformation is very prevalent; that people fall for it because they are gullible, and that it has a strong influence on people's behaviors. Yet, since 2016, a lot of empirical work has shown that this is wrong. Misinformation represents a minute portion of people's media diets — notably because most people aren't very interested in the news and politics. Most people are savvy information consumers and tend to be skeptical of reliable information instead of gullible towards misinformation.

It is difficult to quantify the causal effect of misinformation. But we know from decades of work on the effects of media that mass media has a small effect, at best, on behaviors. We also know that people self-select into like-minded content, for instance, not everyone tunes in to Fox News. People are also suspicious of information they disagree with, are skeptical of the news and very often use misinformation to justify preexisting attitudes, values or behaviors.

Why are we so worried about misinformation then?

A lot of people, including journalists, aren't aware of this body of empirical work, and continue to overemphasize the threat of misinformation. I think it's very intuitive for people to think that misinformation is having all these terrible effects because misinformation always follows crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukraine-Russia war and the Israel-Hamas war. The more we research misinformation, disinformation and fake news, the more we realize that the problem is smaller than we thought, and that it may be less important than we assumed — at least when it comes to explaining complex sociopolitical events such as presidential elections.

Misinformation is the tip of the iceberg. Every time there is a problem, people see misinformation. Whereas it's hard to see the factors that likely cause misinformation to take root such as anti-democratic attitudes, perceptions of corruption, distrust of the government and partisanship.

Do you think we are suffering from increased "information pollution" in that our media ecosystem is flooded with huge amounts of toxic content and false information that has negative impacts on our societies?

I don't agree that there has been an increase in information pollution. People think that conspiracy theories and misinformation are on the rise, and that we live in the golden age of misinformation. But the best evidence suggests that conspiracy theories aren't on the rise, that we idealize the past, and that the past wasn't better than the present.

If anything, exposure to untrustworthy websites decreased between 2016 and 2020 in the US. In some countries, media ecosystems are very likely flooded with misinformation. However, it isn't clear to me that in most Western democracies, media ecosystems are indeed flooded with bad content. For instance, in most countries people mostly turn to trustworthy and established news outlets to learn about the world. And these news outlets often do a pretty decent job.

It's also important to keep in mind that people are exposed to a tiny, tiny fraction of all the information available online. And it's not because most content on the internet is trash that people are exposed to it. People are very good at ignoring stuff they don't care about and scroll or zap to find what they want. We should remember that people have agency and tame new technologies and algorithms in unexpected ways.

Information pollution can have bad consequences for our societies, but the extent to which it has bad consequences is an empirical question. We shouldn't assume that, by default, information pollution has strong effects on societies.