Welcome to Entanglements. In this episode, hosts Brooke Borel and Anna Rothschild ask: Is the misinformation crisis overblown? It’s a question that some observers may be surprised to hear, but researchers don’t always agree on how widespread false information actually is — and how much it truly affects us.
To dig in, our hosts invited two experts with differing opinions to share their points of view, in an effort to find some common ground. The point isn’t to both-sides an issue or to try to force agreement. Instead, the show aims to explore the nuance and subtleties that are often overlooked in heated online forums or in debate-style media.
Their guests this week are Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology at the University of Cambridge, and Hugo Mercier, a cognitive scientist at the Intstitut Jean Nicod in Paris.
Below is the full transcript of the podcast, lightly edited for clarity. New episodes drop every Monday through the end of the year. You can also subscribe to Entanglements at Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Brooke Borel: Welcome to Entanglements, the show where we dig into some of the most heated scientific debates and seek common ground. I’m Brooke Borel.
Anna Rothschild: And I’m Anna Rothschild.
Brooke Borel: Today we’re asking: Is the misinformation crisis overblown?
Anna Rothschild: To be honest, I was surprised when you suggested we tackle this one, Brooke. Like, don’t we all kind of agree that misinformation is a problem?
Brooke Borel: Yeah, yeah. So this is how I felt about it initially as well. But Undark has actually published a few pieces citing experts who don’t think the misinformation crisis is such a big deal. I wasn’t involved with any of those pieces directly, so I wanted to look into it myself.
Anna Rothschild: Cool. I’m really interested to see if my mind will change on this one.
Brooke Borel: Same. OK, Let’s get started.
[Music]
Brooke Borel: The question of the day is: Is the misinformation crisis overblown?
Sander van der Linden: Absolutely not. I don’t believe that the misinformation crisis is overblown.
Brooke Borel: This is Sander van der Linden. He’s a professor of social psychology at the University of Cambridge and he studies how people are impacted by information, especially misinformation, as well as how misinformation spreads on social networks.
And before we dive in, a few quick definitions from Sander. Misinformation is information that is false or misleading. A related but distinct term is disinformation — this is misinformation, but with the intent of deceiving or harming people. And then you also have propaganda, which is disinformation intended to promote a political or corporate agenda.
Brooke Borel: Why are you so confident the crisis over these different kinds of falsities is not overblown? I was wondering if you could sort of lay out the evidence you’re pulling from for people who are not following the science closely.
Sander van der Linden: Yeah, so I think, you know of course as scientists, we always have to have some sense of intellectual humility about the state of affairs. But I think, you know, there’s been an accumulation of evidence that misinformation is to some extent a crisis. And of course it depends on how you define misinformation, right? That if you wanted to minimize the problem, you would define misinformation away to be something completely insignificant and then claim it’s not a problem. So for example, if you restrict what is misinformation to utterly crazy falsehoods like reptile politicians and, you know, flat Earth theories, then by that metric if you look at the research yeah, not too many people believe that and not too many people see that in their feeds unless you’re actively looking for it, right?
Brooke Borel: You’re giving me a funny look, Anna. Maybe I should stop and give you a definition of reptile politicians?
Anna Rothschild: No, I don’t think I need one. I am very familiar with the concept. My last name is Rothschild, after all.
Brooke Borel: OK sorry. I hadn’t even thought about that. OK, maybe you should give a definition to our listeners then?
Anna Rothschild: I mean, do we need to?
Brooke Borel: I don’t know.
Anna Rothschild: There are basically people out there who think that the world is controlled by powerful “lizard people,” who are basically reptilian aliens that shapeshift into humans. And I’m super aware of this because there’s a famous Jewish family called the Rothschilds who are a common target of a lot of conspiracy theories, including this one.
Brooke Borel: Right.
Anna Rothschild: And, for the record, I am not related to the Rothschild banking family, which of course is exactly what a lizard person would say.
Brooke Borel: They would, wouldn’t they?
Anna Rothschild: But that, you know, doesn’t stop people from accusing me of being a lizard person on the internet.
Brooke Borel: How often does that happen?
Anna Rothschild: I mean, pretty much every day. Well, I mean, not exactly always the lizard person one. But there are lots of conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds and at least once a day, one end up in my DMs.
Brooke Borel: Wow, OK. Well that’s scary.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah.
Brooke Borel: Well, anyway, anyway, this is obviously a very fringe idea.
Anna Rothschild: Yes.
Brooke Borel: And I want to be clear that Sander in general, what he is taking about, is not these fringe conspiracy theories. His point is actually that when it comes to misinformation or disinformation, if we are only focusing on really wild conspiracy theories, we’re missing the point.
Sander van der Linden: But if you include under the definition of misinformation also misleading information, which can be based on some kernel of truth but is otherwise manipulative, misleading, using logical fallacies — you know, presenting things out of context or otherwise epistemically dubious strategies to create misperceptions — then all of a sudden the problem widens significantly and people are exposed to hyper-partisan biased content to a much greater degree. And then all of a sudden we have a much bigger problem on our hands because that type of content is actually very prevalent.
Brooke Borel: The estimates on how often we see false information are pretty wide ranging. If we’re talking strictly about fake news — so that’s intentionally misleading information designed to look like real news — the estimate is between 1 and 5 percent of news consumption, depending on what research you’re looking at. But if we broaden the definition to misleading information, it can be much higher. Take a study that looked at misleading health information.
Sander van der Linden: You know, we’re talking about maybe 20 percent, maybe 30 percent of what people see in their feeds. If you’re talking about political manipulated images of a political kind, estimates have shown that can go up to 25 percent of all images that people see on a platform like Facebook. And if you’re talking about audio, you know, there are no good estimates of, for example, audio misinformation.
Brooke Borel: And estimates of how much misinformation a single person sees online may be even higher. Most people are on multiple social media platforms, and consume media in many different ways. And Sander says we don’t really know how to tally the prevalence of false information across all these different sources.
Sander van der Linden: What we need to do actually is figure out: How can we aggregate total exposure data? So, you know, people on Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Meta, TikTok, people are browsing. And that’s just online, right? We don’t have integrated data, so we don’t know total exposure from all of those platforms. We don’t have full access to all of the data. But then there’s also the offline elements. You talk to your neighbors, your friends and family, right? There’s legacy media. There’s cable news. Currently, we’re not aggregating all of these estimates. So even when we come up with lower bound estimates, I think we might be hugely underestimating total exposure.
Brooke Borel: If we aren’t sure — because it’s so hard to measure across platforms and get sort of an aggregate of all the different ways in which we might be getting misinformation and other types of falsities — why assume that we might be underestimating it? Is it possible also that you might be overestimating how bad it is?
Sander van der Linden: I think one of the reasons why I’m concerned that we might be underestimating is because the data that’s being withheld from the public by private companies. You have to wonder about the motives, right? If it was all such wonderful factual information that people are exposed to on these platforms, why not share it with the world? Maybe they’re not keen on sharing the fact that actually people are exposed to a lot of low quality information on social media platforms.
Anna Rothschild: OK. But regardless of how much misinformation we’re exposed to, how do we know there is a crisis? Like, why are we using that word?
Brooke Borel: Right. Maybe the bigger question is: What’s at stake?
Sander van der Linden: There are serious consequences, right? It harms people’s health. People can be hospitalized — people refusing cancer therapy because of pseudoscience and alternative medicine that doesn’t work. Democracy is undermined, right? When you have elections that are decided on a few percentage points, that’s where disinformation, misinformation can make a real difference, especially when it’s targeted at vulnerable populations.
So actually you don’t need to convince a whole population of misinformation. You just need to find a vulnerable subgroup in order to undermine an election. Misinformation can also have indirect effects that are more difficult to measure, but that are very real — like eroding trust in each other in the media and democracy. So there’s all of these pernicious consequences of misinformation that lead to very concrete, I think, and practical consequences, for people individually, but also for democracy as a whole.
[Music]
Anna Rothschild: OK, well, when you start to say that individual lives and even democracy as a whole are on the line I think it’s fair to conclude that there is a crisis.
Brooke Borel: Yes, if you directly connect misinformation to political violence and conspiratorial beliefs, then it’s hard to argue that there isn’t a problem here, right? But what if those things weren’t connected?
Anna Rothschild: Not to sound stupid but huh?
Brooke Borel: OK, this will all be clear when you hear a different point of view.
[Music]
Brooke Borel: The question of the day is: Is the misinformation crisis overblown?
Hugo Mercier: Yes, it is, in the sense that I don’t think that misinformation creates as many harms as most people think it does — and that these harms have been greatly exaggerated by the media, but also by academics to some extent.
Brooke Borel: This is Hugo Mercier. He’s a cognitive scientist at the Intstitut Jean Nicod in Paris. And to be clear, Hugo doesn’t study misinformation specifically. Rather, his focus is on human communication more broadly. What do people believe and why do they believe it? He’s also interested in how and whether mass persuasion works. And by the way, when it comes to defining the types of false information, Hugo was pretty much on the same page as Sander. But otherwise not so much.
Brooke Borel: Why are you confident that there’s no misinformation crisis?
Hugo Mercier: So people have looked at the effects of advertising, they’ve looked at the effects of political campaigns, they’ve looked at the effects of kind of religious proselytizing. And in all of these cases, what is found is that the effects are very, very, very small. And so there’s just no reason to believe that misinformation would be an exception to this, to this overwhelming pattern.
And by the way, people are just not exposed to misinformation that much. I mean, at least fake news, the most kind of egregious type of misinformation. On average, it constitutes between 1 and 5 percent of the information people consume.
Brooke Borel: Hugo’s citing the same stat as Sander here for fake news — which, to Sander’s point, is a fairly narrow way to measure false information. But ultimately Hugo’s take is that the amount of false information people are seeing may not matter that much.
Anna Rothschild: Oh, OK well I want to hear more about that.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. But before we get there, let me tell you a little more about his research.
Anna Rothschild: Oh sure. Yeah that’d be great.
Brooke Borel: OK, so he takes on an evolutionary perspective. And he argues that in order for us to have evolved to communicate, it had to have some sort of benefit to us as a species. So, we’re not as gullible as people think. If we were, we would have died out already. He’s not the only one who says this, by the way — there is, as he called it, a rich literature on the topic.
Anna Rothschild: OK, I mean I see how that makes sense on a species-wide basis. But surely there are cases where the fact that some humans could dupe others gave them an edge, right? We actually see that in nature with some animals.
Brooke Borel: Of course. Excellent question, Anna.
Anna Rothschild: Well, why thank you. I did work in an evolutionary biology lab at one point.
Brooke Borel: Right, so you know what you’re talking about. So I asked Hugo about this and here’s what he said.
Hugo Mercier: Undoubtedly it happens. Just on average, it has to be beneficial. Like, it can’t be the case that on average we suffer from communication. So we’re not stupid. And there’s a lot of work now in adults, but also surprisingly even in very small children, showing how adept they are at evaluating communication. So whether there are good arguments or not, whether someone is an expert or not, whether someone has their best interest at heart or not. So if 3-year-olds can do it, presumably adults are well able to evaluate communication well enough most of the time.
Brooke Borel: The context that we evolved is different than what’s happening today, right? Like the lies or other misinformation that might show up in nature as our species was evolving seem different than being confronted with stuff on social media, for example. So I guess I’m trying, maybe you could speak more about how you see that connection, or if there is a connection there.
Hugo Mercier: Yes.
Brooke Borel: And what happens when our environment has changed so rapidly?
Hugo Mercier: We haven’t evolved to deal with TikTok quite yet. No, indeed. Yeah. So no, that’s a very good question. And that’s what evolutionary biologists call an adaptive lag. Clearly these adaptive lags have important effects. But I think their main effect is that we miss out on a lot of correct information that is out there and that people tend to reject.
Brooke Borel: It feels like that’s part of the same issue. Believing false information, also rejecting true information. Wouldn’t that be part of the same problem?
Hugo Mercier: So, what happens essentially is that any form of mass persuasion is going to face tremendous difficulty to influence anybody. To give extreme examples, even things like hurricane warnings are ignored by many people. Like, even when there’s truthful, very useful information that is put out by authorities many people are overly dubious of that information. So that’s true both for harmful and for helpful information.
The difference I guess is that in the case of harmful information, or information that is kind of inaccurate, in many cases the information that is inaccurate and that’s prized is information that will fit with people’s priors.
Brooke Borel: Hugo used the example of the 2020 presidential election, where many people believed that Trump actually won and some of them stormed the capital. According to him, those people already had strong beliefs about Trump and sought out media that confirmed their priors. And any false reports that supported the idea of a rigged election — that’s not what actually persuaded them.
Anna Rothschild: OK, but what about the initial false information that they may have consumed in order to get to that point? You know, a lot of people who stormed the capital in January of 2021 were confirmed conspiracy theorists.
Brooke Borel: Yeah I know, and Hugo and I discussed this. Have a listen.
Brooke Borel: So if someone already has a false belief, the misinformation doesn’t matter, like they’re already going to believe it. But I mean, didn’t they get that initial belief in part because of misinformation? If we’re using that example again, they were consuming media, perhaps, that Trump was definitely going to win. Also, there was, they were consuming media that was suggesting that if he didn’t win it was going to be rigged. Is that not misinformation that they’re ingesting for their priors?
Hugo Mercier: I mean it’s going to play a role at the margin. But then again, why is the media saying that? The media saying that because there’s a demand for people saying that even before the election. I mean there’s going to be demand after the election even more because now you’ve actually lost it. But there’s also a demand to like kind of preemptively say look, even if we lose somehow it’s actually going to be rigged. So this, I mean, people, I mean, the U.S. is a free country, people are not forced to watch any kind of media. If they’re going to consume that kind of media, it’s because they like what they’re hearing in that media. And so media are just variously good at serving different audiences and at telling them things that mostly they want to hear. The belief that people tend to be gullible and that other people are very susceptible to false information is one that is very widespread.
And so when the media tells people, look, there is this misinformation crisis. And if people you disagree with have the opinion that they do, it’s because they watch the wrong TV channel and not because they have fundamentally different preferences from you. People are happy to buy that narrative. So again there is a demand even for this narrative to explain why so many people seem to hold an opinion that you abhor.
[Music]
Brooke Borel: OK, Anna, how you feeling?
Anna Rothschild: I’m not sure. So just to make sure I have this straight: Hugo is arguing that there might be demand for misinformation, because people like seeing or hearing things that confirm their prior assumptions. But ultimately, the misinformation itself isn’t the problem?
Brooke Borel: Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: Like, people are just already primed to have a specific worldview and the misinformation isn’t going to nudge them in one direction or another. It might be confirming their priors, not actually convincing them?
Brooke Borel: Yeah, exactly. And how do you feel about that?
Anna Rothschild: I don’t know that I buy it. I mean get the idea that misinformation may just reinforce our pre-existing beliefs. That makes sense to me. But false beliefs have to start from somewhere. Couldn’t they be informed by misinformation? And I guess more than that, doesn’t the misinformation still help motivate those people to action and sometimes even violence?
Brooke Borel: Those are great questions and they came up in our joint conversation. So, are you ready to hear?
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, I am!
[Music]
Brooke Borel: I discovered on the call that Sander and Hugo have interacted before, if briefly, and they are very aware of one another’s work.
Sander van der Linden: Hugo gave a talk about his work at the university — I think it was during the pandemic, so it was a virtual talk — which I very much enjoyed.
Hugo Mercier: Yes, thank you. Yeah, no, I actually, yeah, I kind of have forgotten about that.
Sander van der Linden: I think we initially actually got in touch because of some work that we’re doing on presenting expert consensus to skeptics and whether or not people update their beliefs. And I was, very interested in that work that Hugo was doing at the time.
Hugo Mercier: I mean, we’ve been following closely, you work on consensus messaging, which has inspired us in some ways.
Brooke Borel: So you find one another’s work interesting, but you don’t always agree on everything.
Hugo Mercier: No. Yes and no.
Sander van der Linden: I think yeah. I think yes and no. That’s right.
Brooke Borel: Excellent. Perfect.
Brooke Borel: From there, though, it became clear that they don’t agree on many things. First, they got into vaccination and false information.
Hugo Mercier: When you’re as convinced as we are that vaccination is on the whole tremendous invention and that most forms of vaccines that are out there are certainly very beneficial, it seems weird to us that people reject it. But the fact is that every society, since vaccination has been introduced, there are people who have rejected vaccination. And if we take a step back, it is a pretty counterintuitive practice that you take something from someone who’s sick, and you process it somehow, and then you’re going to inject that in a perfectly healthy baby, like it is such an act of trust that people, that anybody gets vaccinated, to get their children vaccinated. So it’s not as if the default for people’s minds is to accept vaccination. The default is really overwhelming to reject vaccination. So that’s not what we should, what we have to explain is not why people reject vaccinations. That is why on the contrary, most people, in spite of that, manage to accept vaccination.
Sander van der Linden: Certainly I think trust plays an important role, and values. I mean, certainly when I had to vaccinate my children, I mean, I’m as pro-vax as you get, but you still get these intuitive thoughts. Is this safe? You know, have I read all the side effects? So I think that’s a perfectly normal feeling for people to experience and you have to suppress that in some way. But I would say that maybe it’s useful to think about the impact of misinformation as like a total effect that has both direct and indirect components. So I would say that, yeah, sure, with some things, misinformation isn’t directly impacting people, but it’s sort of indirectly shaping misperceptions and our judgments and intuitions.
Hugo Mercier: I agree with you that there is a lot of misinformation circulating about vaccination because there is demand for that. Because people want that stuff. They want to justify their intuitive rejection of vaccination.
Brooke Borel: So here, Hugo talked about an infamous paper by Andrew Wakefield, a former physician in the United Kingdom. In 1998, Wakefield published a study in the medical journal The Lancet claiming that the vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella — the MMR vaccine — was linked to autism. There were major problems with the paper, it was later retracted, and that claim has been proven wrong time and time again. But listen to how differently Hugo and Sander think about the effects of that specific paper.
Hugo Mercier: There was a slight increase in specific rejection of MMR vaccine when physicians believed the paper was real. So in the couple of years that followed the publication, but no media was talking about it.
Brooke Borel: Just a quick note: Hugo is talking about a paper that speculates that after the Wakefield article, some doctors in the U.S. may have been hesitant to prescribe the MMR vaccine. Doctors can be influential in whether or not parents get their kids’ shots. At the time, the study says, there was little media coverage of the Wakefield article in the U.S. But after the paper was retracted, that changed.
Hugo Mercier: There was a massive media coverage of the paper, and the rates of MMR vaccination didn’t drop at all. It’s just, some people are, for reasons that are not, I agree with you, completely elucidated, just do not like vaccination at all. And they’re going to become extreme kind of vaccine hesitant people or kind of anti-vax people. But then again this is a phenomenon that is, that drives a demand from misinformation about vaccination rather than the other around and that’s why we don’t have similar phenomena about most other times types of therapies.
Sander van der Linden: I would disagree on the Wakefield paper. I mean, I think there’s very strong evidence that when the Wakefield paper came out, there was a massive drop in vaccinations.
Hugo Mercier: I can show you the graph if you want, that’s just not the case.
Sander van der Linden: No, there was, I mean, there’s been multiple studies that have shown that there’s a clear link and a massive drop in vaccination coverage in, the U.K. And even in the U.S. There’s newer studies that actually link, the MMR coverage to increased incidence reports of, fake side effects that people have reported because of the coverage.
Brooke Borel: Quick fact check: There was a drop in MMR vaccination rates in the U.K. following the Wakefield paper. And in the U.S. there were more claims of vaccine injury.
Sander van der Linden: So, you know, my reading is that there’s very strong evidence that the Wakefield paper impacted vaccinations, although I would agree with you that misinformation isn’t the only factor to consider with vaccine hesitancy. It’s a complex decision that has to do with values, trust, intuitions. There’s demand. I don’t doubt that there’s demand for vaccine hesitancy. People seek out information that confirms their prior beliefs. But the more interesting tidbit that we disagree on, I think, is actually this intuition part, because people aren’t blank slates. I agree. People don’t walk around, you know, just being indoctrinated by information. But where do people get their prior experiences from? It’s from an incorrect sampling of the environment.
Brooke Borel: Hugo and Sander had this sort of fight a number of times. On the impact of propaganda during the Holocaust, and during the Rwandan genocide. At one point, Sander even tried to share his screen to show a paper that they were disagreeing about. But ultimately, all that back and forth led to this.
Sander van der Linden: But let me pose the question to you, Hugo. Why would people storm the Capitol if it wasn’t based on a conspiracy theory that suggested that the election wasn’t stolen? I mean, people don’t wake up one day and storm the Capitol, right? Why do people in Russia believe propaganda about Ukraine? Is it because of all the propaganda about Ukrainians? Or people just don’t make this stuff up on their own, you know? That’s kind of what makes me skeptical.
Hugo Mercier: They do. They very much do. So when you’re in a conflict with another country, people are going to spontaneously generate beliefs that belittle the other country, the other party. I mean, we don’t like to just attack people without having good reasons for it. And so whenever there are other motivations for us to attack people because we want their stuff, because we want their territory, because, for whatever reasons, because we think they’re threatening us, then we’re going to find reasons for it. And these reasons emerge spontaneously. If there is some authority that will provide them to us, it’s even better. We don’t have to work so hard to do it ourselves. So if you control for the exposure, the only thing that matters are the priors, what are your interests, where do you stand before the exposure to the misinformation.
Sander van der Linden: Where do you think this prior intention comes from, that you don’t like a group of people?
Hugo Mercier: Then again, people are not blank slates, like, people have minds, people have interests that diverge from each other. I mean, sometimes your neighbor has something that you want, and so, it’s not that you’ve been brainwashed into believing that his stuff is valuable. It’s just human value and nature, to want stuff and other people want other stuff and we disagree.
Sander van der Linden: I can see that. I disagree with it a little bit. I think that people don’t wake up with the idea that Jews control the media or that Muslims are terrorists. I think this is intentionally disseminated propaganda that leads to the formation of stereotypes that then people use in their priors. That’s kind of how I see it.
Brooke Borel: It seems so difficult to tease out. It’s like a chicken and egg thing almost that you two seem to be talking about, right? Like what, what influences the propaganda or misinformation or whatever, and then what gets picked up by other people? It’s this circular thing, like where does it even begin and how do we even make sense of it?
Sander van der Linden: Right? Imagine trying to measure this empirically.
Brooke Borel: At this point seemed like we were at a bit of an impasse. So we moved on.
Brooke Borel: What is at stake with the misinformation crisis or the very act of calling it a crisis if it’s not a crisis?
Hugo Mercier: Well, I guess what’s at stake is the question of priorities. I mean, priorities for research and priorities for public policy? What are the, you know, politicians can’t deal with every problem. And I think that if they prioritize fighting misinformation — I’m not saying that fighting misinformation is completely useless and that, you know, everybody who’s doing it at the moment should stop. But at the margin, if you have to allocate more effort to solve problems in society, I don’t think that misinformation should be anywhere near the top.
Sander van der Linden: Some wars are started over misinformation or misperception. Some wars are exacerbated by misinformation that causes misperceptions. Climate change is exacerbated by misinformation. I think misinformation affects all other risks and it’s also a risk in itself.
Brooke Borel: Did you agree more or less than you’re expecting to today?
Hugo Mercier: On my end, it went about as I expected, to be honest.
Sander van der Linden: I would agree. Though I will say that I’ve learned more about the underlying thoughts and where he’s coming from. I think I have more insights now into what’s driving some of the theorizing and how to conceptualize the problem from the perspective of somebody who’s has a very different point of view.
Hugo Mercier: Yeah, likewise, I feel as if I’m understanding better where you’re coming from.
Brooke Borel: Oh, that’s so great. And what will each of you be thinking about the most as you move away from this conversation?
Hugo Mercier: How to empirically convince Sander. I mean you’re a smart person. If I had better arguments, I’m sure I would convince you if I, you know, had better data, if I had more logical arguments. So it’s also on me and other people who share my point of view to do better.
Sander van der Linden: Now I’m very intrigued by trying to disentangle what part of our priors are shaped by prior incorrect information and which were just there all along. People are born with intuitions, right. Which ones are just there and which ones are shaped by interactions with inaccurate information in our environment? And how to disentangle the two and relate them to modern misperceptions seems like a big intangible project right now. But I’m hoping to think more about it.
Brooke Borel: And might these two scientists collaborate on any projects together, to better understand the sources of their disagreements?
Hugo Mercier: Like one of these adversarial collaborations. In principle it would be interesting, yeah.
Sander van der Linden: Maybe doing research together on a topic you actually agree on is a good gateway to then doing something you don’t agree on. So maybe we can something —
Hugo Mercier: Start slow.
Sander van der Linden: Start slow. That’s right, that’s right. Yeah. I feel this is kinda almost like an intervention I didn’t know we needed, but it was interesting for sure. Yeah.
[Music]
Anna Rothschild: Aw, that’s cute that they would maybe work together.
Brooke Borel: I know, I love it when this happens.
Anna Rothschild: I know, I feel like you did your job well.
Brooke Borel: Well thank you. I try, I try. So how are you feeling about this topic more broadly?
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. I mean, I will say that I don’t think my opinion has changed vastly since before I heard the group conversation. I still think that, you know, Hugo is probably right that we seek out media that confirms our preconceived ideas. That rings true to me. But I still just think that it is unlikely that certain types of violence, particularly political violence, would happen without people being exposed to misinformation. I don’t know that people would have stormed the Capitol on January 6 — even with their preconceived ideas — if they hadn’t been exposed to very specific types of misinformation that kind of organized them, you know?
Brooke Borel: I mean also, I think it’s a really important question as to how this stuff all starts and I’m glad people are thinking about it and looking into it. But at the end of the day, there are real world consequences right? Whether it is misinformation totally driving everything or just exacerbating things that are already happening out in society, there are acts of violence and political manipulation and the sort of stuff that is happening that have real world consequences. So, I don’t know. It does seem still like a pretty fraught thing.
Anna Rothschild: Totally. Yeah.
Brooke Borel: I also am wondering, is the framing — is the question wrong? Like is this a crisis? And is it specifically a misinformation crisis? Or is there another question that would really get at all of these issues a little bit better? We do tend to use this word crisis quite a bit. We talk about the climate crisis, the crisis for democracy, all these crises that we’re in.
Anna Rothschild: Mm, yeah.
Brooke Borel: And I’m not saying those aren’t pretty serious issues, right, with pretty severe consequences. But maybe there is way in framing it that way that kind of overshadows some of these nuances that are really worth poking at a little bit more.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, I mean, maybe to Hugo’s point it’s not just about misinformation. It’s more about division more broadly or something.
Brooke Borel: Mhmm. Yeah. I’m curious what our listeners think about all that.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, me too. If you have some thoughts please send us an email at [email protected]
Brooke Borel: Yeah. And that’s it for this episode of Entanglements, brought to you by Undark magazine, which is published by the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. The show is fact checked by Undark deputy editor Jane Reza. Our production editor is Amanda Grennell, and Adriana Lacy is our audience engagement editor. Special thanks to our editor in chief, Tom Zeller Jr. I’m Brooke Borel.
Anna Rothschild: And I’m Anna Rothschild. Thanks for listening. See you next time.