Dr. Claire Wardle – Lies, Damned Lies and Social Media
Dr. Claire Wardle is a leading expert on social media, user generated content, and verification. Her research sits at the intersection of technology, communications theory, and mass and social media. Dr. Wardle is the co-founder and leader of First Draft the world’s foremost nonprofit focused on research and practice to address misinformation and disinformation. First Draft is housed at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Misha Zelinsky caught up with Claire for a chinwag about the scourge of misinformation, why truth and fact matter in democracies, how we can inoculate people against falsehoods, how journalism can be reinvigorated at the local and national levels, regulating big tech and dealing with autocrats.
Transcript:
Misha Zelinsky:
Right. Claire Wardle, welcome to Diplomates. Thank you so much for joining us.
Claire Wardle:
It is my pleasure.
Misha Zelinsky:
The pleasure’s all ours. Now, I thought a good place to start… There’s a lot of places we can take this conversation around information, but it feels like only just yesterday that this whole concept of disinformation, misinformation, gray zone interference, fake news, all these things have exploded into the discourse. And given you’re an expert, maybe you might just give a handy summation of the differences or the subtle differences in definitions here that we should be aware of?
Claire Wardle:
Yes. We can talk about definitions. We also might want to think about the history of we all felt like it started in 2016, but of course it had been around for a long time before that. But the big thing is disinformation starts with a D. It’s all about people who deliberately create information designed to be harmful. That’s actually the people who do that are a certain type of creator. They want to do this for political influence. They want to make money. Some people just want to do it to make trouble, but those people are actually relatively small in number.
Claire Wardle:
The bigger problem we have is misinformation, which is when that same disinformation gets circulated by my mom, who doesn’t realize that it’s false. Certainly doesn’t mean any harm. She’s had her emotions manipulated by these bad actors who know how to make my mom scared. I mean, so that’s what’s going on here, is that we actually have a relatively small number of people creating this stuff. If we all knew how to spot it and didn’t share it, we wouldn’t have a problem. The problem we have is that as humans we’re designed to like this kind of stuff, the platforms are optimized for this kind of stuff, and people know how to create content that is going to be shared very, very quickly. So that’s a problem we have now.
Misha Zelinsky:
Yeah, and so I want to talk about all the social media where it’s being generated, but just starting at the beginning, what’s the role of information in a society, particularly in a democratic society? You’ve spoken about in your work the information commons. Why do we need it, what happens when it’s polluted, so to speak, with misinformation or disinformation?
Claire Wardle:
Yeah, I think 30 years ago, we would have sat around and had this conversation, and said, “Oh, it’s really important for democracy to flourish that everybody is working, using the same… They need accurate information to make decisions.” We would have said that that was pretty straightforward. But I think we didn’t necessarily recognize how important it was to have gatekeepers. Gatekeepers in themselves are pretty problematic, because who ends up being gatekeepers? Well, they tend to be white, they tend to be men, blah, blah, blah.
Claire Wardle:
But I don’t think we quite understood what it meant when people had a shared media ecosystem. They had three channels. They were watching the same nightly news broadcast. The internet came and we got so excited, but we didn’t really recognize what it meant when people can seek out information that confirms their worldview, and they can seek out and find other people who think the same as them. And so all of a sudden, the commons… On the one hand, you went, “The internet has created this amazing commons, where everybody can say whatever they want and it’s amazing.” But it’s also like a massive riot. The weirdos are in one corner. When you really think about what it means when you don’t have a shared sense of reality.
Claire Wardle:
And that to me was why the 6th of January was this just horrific… I mean, it’s horrific in so many ways, but for me, as somebody who thinks about this a lot, has written about it, I was like, “What?” Everything I’ve written was for nothing, because it was almost like I talk about what’s the difference between dis and misinformation, blah, blah, blah, but the people who stormed the Capitol believed that they had right on their side and they were the ones that were basically defending the constitution, defending democracy. But they were in a completely different reality. So when we say they’d seen a few conspiracies, their whole information reality is completely different to the one that the other half of the country is living in. So that for me was when it was like, “Holy cow, how does society function when you have half the public in one reality and half the public in another?” And that’s what we’re living through right now.
Misha Zelinsky:
Let’s talk about a set of shared facts. One of the old aphorisms is, “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” Or Churchill said, “The truth is incontrovertible. It can be maligned and attacked, but in the end, there it is.” We’re in this era that I appreciate it didn’t keep up with Trump, but it certainly got metastasized and accelerated even at the beginning of his presidency with this concept of alternative facts, fake news. Does that aphorism still hold, or is it just dead?
Claire Wardle:
It does hold, because that was the thing that was so shocking the weekend of his inauguration in 2017, when Sean Spicer basically said they were the biggest crowds ever. And at the time, journalists were laughing, like, “No, it wasn’t.” But what they were doing, and what they continued to do, was just deny the facts, even if they were visually there in front of you. They put up a big picture to say, “Look how big the crowds were,” and we were like, “No.” I think the problem was, because it just seemed so unbelievable that the lies would be so obvious, that nobody really took it so seriously. He didn’t warm up to it. He just started the first weekend of his presidency, just bold-faced lie.
Claire Wardle:
So then the media were busy going, “Can we call it a lie? We’re not sure.” All of this kind of academic conversation about it, whilst what was happening was just learning that he could just lie, and keep denying, and saying, “No, you’re wrong,” and gaslighting. And he showed how hugely successful it was, because in an era without gatekeepers, the gatekeepers were busy saying, “Can we call it a lie or not? We’re not sure. Let’s have a conference to discuss whether or not we can call it a lie.” But he as president was just like, “I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing to do, because I’ve got my Twitter account. I’ve got my Facebook page. I can just go directly to my supporters. I don’t need those gatekeepers. And if they tell me that I’m lying, I’ll tell my supporters I’m not.”
Claire Wardle:
If you and I had this conversation in 2012-2013 and you said, “Can you imagine this environment?” We would have been like, “No, there’s no way that people would have accepted lies like that.” Turns out when you have channels that you control, and you’ve got supporters who are seeking information that makes them feel better because their worldview is being confirmed, then yeah, people will take lies and will not challenge them. And that has been the horrible, horrible lesson that we’ve all learned over the last five years.
Misha Zelinsky:
So one of the things I think’s also difficult, because we all get this at the macro, but where’s the line between tough politics and misinformation and lies? Because politicians and political parties will take the other side’s policies, and critique them, and perhaps present them in a way that’s not the most pleasant. But where’s the difference between that and basically what you’re talking and describing there, and how do you take difference?
Claire Wardle:
Yeah, you’re right. Politicians have always misled. They’ve always been careful about the statistics that they use. They would cherry-pick. They would be careful about the question, all these things. But when you think about actually when fact-checking started, it started in 1999. Brooks Jackson, who had been at CNN, was like, “I’m seeing all of these political ads on TV just include falsehoods, and there’s no oversight because these politicians can say whatever they want.” So he started Factcheck.org with Kathleen Hall Jamieson at the University of Pennsylvania, and it was designed specifically to fact-check ads. I remember seeing at that time somebody talking about it who would design these political ads, and said, “Yeah, you know what? Once we had some oversight, I’m not going to lie. We didn’t lie as much in our ads because we didn’t want Factcheck to call us out.” That was when we lived in an environment where you got called out, and you were like, “Oh, whoops. Somebody’s caught us. We’re not going to do it.”
Claire Wardle:
But that changed. If we think about 2016, we all know it was Russian trolls in their basements. It was Macedonian teenagers. There was this idea that it was on the fringes. 2018 was when Trump and Co. really realized that they could just lie themselves, and so now we unfortunately see many, many politicians following that same model, and then we see that amplification via the media. So misinformation moved from the fringes to when you have politicians lying, they then get given all this oxygen from the media. It’s a very, very different problem than the 2016 problem, which was like, “Okay, let’s clamp down on bot accounts. Let’s make sure that Facebook doesn’t accept ads paid for by Russian repeat.” That stuff revolt, that’s changed. But ultimately, yeah, politicians have always lied, but now they have an ability through social media to lie with impunity. And that’s the problem.
Misha Zelinsky:
So we’re going to talk a lot about democracy and problems about misinformation problems. Just speaking with the autocrats here, with the CCP and the Russians, and what they’re doing in terms of gray zone interference and seeding, you talked at the beginning about a lot of the disinformation actually comes from relatively narrow sources. Maybe give some examples about disinformation campaigns and what they’re designed to do, because as I understand it, they’re not trying to make us believe their narrative. It’s to make every narrative, real? To foster cynicism in democracy, which therefore makes them ungovernable, and therefore they’re not attractive to their domestic populace. Maybe you could talk a bit about that.
Claire Wardle:
Yeah, I mean, one of my favorite documentaries is Operation Infection, that the New York Times put out in 2018. One of the reasons I love it so much is that they went and found footage of Russian spies in the 1980s basically being really just out there about their techniques involving information warfare. And we know this. Russian didn’t have the same money during the Cold War. What did they have? Well, they could use their smarts to think about information differently. And there’s this amazing quote where this guy basically is talking about the drip, drip, drip of water, and that an individual drip doesn’t cause any harm, but a continuous drip can split a rock into a million pieces.
Claire Wardle:
And that’s essentially what information warfare is, and that’s what Russia and China, and increasingly a number of other countries are very good at. So thinking about autocrats in Hungary, or Bolsonaro in Brazil, or Duterte. They’re much more attacking their own country, but it’s not about convincing people of one thing or another. It’s about sowing distrust and doubt. So if you look at the way that the Russian troll accounts were creating content during 2016, 30% of their content was actually U.S. local news headlines, but they would take local news headlines that they knew would annoy the left and annoy the right. So they would take Black Lives Matter on one side, then they would take police brutality on the other, and it didn’t matter, because they just were like, “America is already so divided. We’ll just take the content that’s already there, and we’ll just amplify it.”
Claire Wardle:
And that’s the genius of this, which is the tactics. Some of these campaigns are going to fail, but it costs nothing to try, and so the thing that Russia in particular has been so good at is looking at the U.S. and saying, “Where are the wedge issues? How can we really accelerate those wedge issues?” China is much more about just flooding the environment. Particularly internally, they know exactly how they can just control the narrative, but either way, whether you’re looking at the Russian techniques or the Chinese technique, it doesn’t cost anything, or it’s very low-level, and you can just flood the zone, to use that term, and see what sticks. And unfortunately, in environments that are free and open, and you have the First Amendment, America’s this perfect Petri dish to do this. And that’s why these techniques have been so successful.
Misha Zelinsky:
And so do you think democracy’s a bit naive in allowing this asymmetry to happen? Because obviously it’s very difficult to get any information into Russia or into China, particularly the Great Firewall. You can’t Google the Tiananmen Square Massacre if you’re within the PRC. And yet we’re letting disinformation just flow in from these places. Have we been naive in that regard?
Claire Wardle:
No, because the democracies that we come from, they’ve been doing it too. So we’re not as good at it because we also have ethics policies. I remember being at a panel with somebody from the U.S. State Department talking about videos and ads that they would place in Moscow to try and reach young Russians, but of course at the beginning of the ads, they had to have a pre-roll that said, “This is sponsored by the State Department,” because that’s what happens in the U.S. So it’s not that the UK, the U.S., Australia hasn’t thought about information operations.
Claire Wardle:
All countries are doing it, but there isn’t an asymmetry here, but the one thing I think gets forgotten is 2016 was Russia really was very aggressive. And how successful they were is still open to debate about whether or not those Hillary Clinton memes swayed the election. There’s always going to be that debate, but what I think people haven’t recognized is that by the 2018 mid-terms and certainly by 2020, it wasn’t Russian interference. It was the techniques had been embedded inside. It was domestic actors that were using the same techniques. So now we’re like, “Oh, we’re being naive.” It’s too late now. It’s too late.
Claire Wardle:
The problems are internal, and watching somewhere like Australia, I see the UK and Australia tearing itself apart now around vaccines and masks, and being like, “How did that happen?” I’ve always thought, “Well, we’re not America.” Well, it turns out, because the Internet is global, there are movements now that are connected. So it’s starting in the U.S., but then it’s traveling to London, Berlin, Melbourne, really quickly. And I’m seeing in Australia people sharing completely false information about mail-in ballots that doesn’t even exist in Australia. But it doesn’t really matter, because they’ve heard enough of the narratives from Trump, and you’ve got, “You can’t trust mail-in ballots in Australia.” You don’t even have them, but that’s the point that we’re at. It’s so crazy.
Misha Zelinsky:
Yeah. So, conspiracy theories. Why are we so attracted to them? Obviously they’re not new. Growing up, you had the Moon landing was faked, and all these sorts of things. But it feels like they have just been absolutely turbo-charged at the moment. First, I suppose, why are we so attracted to them, and why are they so dangerous?
Claire Wardle:
Yeah. I mean, it’s true that too much of the conversation about misinformation focuses on the content, like, “Should this YouTube video be taken down? Should this Facebook post be labeled?” This is all about psychology, and you’re absolutely right. We’ve always had conspiracy theories, but they’ve always been on the fringes. The last 18 months, they are slap-bang. They’ve moved absolutely into the mainstream. Why? Because everybody’s worlds have been turned upside-down. And we’ve always had, I would argue since 2008, the financial crisis, people are concerned about climate, communities are changing because of global migration flows, technology has disrupted everything, so the world is much scarier and unstable than it’s been for a very, very long time. So we’re in this situation, and we’re looking for an explanation.
Claire Wardle:
And who provides an explanation? Well, conspiracy theories are simple, powerful stories. And again, going back to being humans, we love a good yarn, as you say. We love a good story, and it’s a simple explanation. The world that you and I live in, well, it’s complex, and the data’s not quite in, and we can’t quite tell you whether vaccines are safe when it comes to nine-year-old boys and myocarditis, but we’re still working on it, and we can’t really tell you this, but keep trusting us. Follow the guidelines. It’s going to change. The world is messy. Global supply chains… The world that you and I live in, it’s very difficult to read the news every day without being really, really depressed.
Claire Wardle:
Over here, the conspiracy side of things, which is like, “I’ll tell you why your life is upside-down. Because there is a secret cabal of people that are puppeteering and that’s why your life is not turning out the way that you’d hoped it would do.” Now that takes the agency out of it. It’s not your fault that life isn’t great. It’s somebody else’s fault, and so that element of a simple narrative is really soothing to people who right now are feeling very unstable.
Claire Wardle:
And the other thing is there’s the famous book from 1994, Bowling Alone, when Robert Putnam basically talked about-
Misha Zelinsky:
Yeah, right book.
Claire Wardle:
Yeah, people aren’t connected. Fewer people are going to church, all that stuff. Well, it turns out when you talk to people who are in conspiracy theories, when they’ve lost their son of like, “Yeah, my son works night shifts.” So we’d go online. The only people saying hello to him were in queue and on. So it turns out and it’s the same way as there’s a great Netflix documentary about flatter. If you watch it to deal with whether the earth is flat around, it’s about friendship, it’s about connections, it’s about feeling wanted, it’s about feeling seen and feeling heard that’s what’s going on. And ultimately is what I would argue as we think about the space we’re in, the disinformation ecosystem is participatory and people feel like they have agency. They feel like they’re head like, “Stop the steel, send us your tips. We want to hear from you, do your own research.”
Claire Wardle:
The world that many of us live in, who were probably listening to this podcast, our information ecosystem is top-down linear hierarchical, which is there as an expert, whose going to tell you what to think and you’re meant to accept that information though thank you very much. There’s not much agency in our information ecosystem and we’re meant to trust adoptive factors of this world. Now it turns out if we, if our information ecosystem doesn’t learn from the other side, we’re going to carry on in this world where those that understand that the internet is networked and participatory, that’s the way that people want their information not, “Hey, here’s a top down piece of information that you have to trust.”
Misha Zelinsky:
Well, let’s talk about trust because I think, yeah, trust is an information and trust in institutions is rapidly declined in every liberal democracy pretty much not so much in the Europeans, certainly in the Anglosphere. How much has that impacted, in terms of the running down of those institutions and then people fleeing to these alternative sources of information, because there’s always been that you can’t trust the news concept, or don’t believe everything you read, but it’s interesting the skepticism. The thing that I can’t quite get my head around is I’ll sit with someone and they’ll tell me you can’t believe what you read in the news. And they’ll show me TikTok video. And I’ll just say it blows my mind. So I’m trying to understand why is trust so round down in the traditional institutions in the world you described that world we inhabit, but so readily absorbed in this other?
Claire Wardle:
Yeah. I think it’s going back and thinking about recent history, global financial crisis. What happened to those bankers? Nothing. Increased corruption in government. What happens to them? I mean, even the UK, I mean, 20 years ago, ministers would resign when there was a scandal. I mean, they-
Misha Zelinsky:
Right, same thing with Australia.
Claire Wardle:
Yeah. If people keep seeing that and the institutions they’re meant to trust, or the CDC tells me to not wear a mask and then a month later says, “Oh yeah, wear a mask.” I mean, when institutions are making mistakes, that happens, newsrooms make a mistake. But now there’s no like, “Oh, okay. We’ll just give them the benefit of the doubt,” because trust is declining. So every time something happens as another scammers, it’s just reinforcing this idea that you can’t trust institutions. So what’s happened? People are turned inwards to each other. And whereas before you could argue, well, they trust the person that they know from the school gate because their kids go to the same school or they play on the same soccer team. But now that people used to scroll through TikTok every night, they believe that they know those people in the same way as the person that they play soccer with at the other weekend.
Claire Wardle:
So now we go, “Why did you trust that person on TikTok?” What’s that terrible word authenticity? They feel like they have this authenticity from people on TikTok in a way that they’re not getting from Boris Johnson or Dr. Fauci or whatever. So that’s the other piece here, which is people believe that they’re trusting those that they know better, but that in itself is a facade. But the technology makes us believe that we know these people because they’re being honest about the fact that they burned their sausages or whatever it is.
Misha Zelinsky:
I mean, this problem we’re getting is a symptom of the border problem of the degradation of trust and consequences, et cetera. I mean, inequality, people feeling labor laws are up to. And I mean, that makes a lot of sense when you put it in those terms. So going back to the media, you talked about that our media phone call that the traditional media, the mainstream media, whatever they want to call it. You talked about learning from the new ecosystem. What does that look like? Because how do you maintain good journalistic standards? And at the same time responding in that in a way that’s giving people information in the manner that they want it.
Claire Wardle:
Yeah. I’ve first got into this field like, 2008, 2009, because I did some research for the BBC about user generated content. And at that time there were very few people in newsrooms who got social media. And so those that did understood had this amazing participatory opportunity. So you’d see they would do these amazing crowdsourcing campaigns. They would do, I remember Bristol in the West of England, they were having a new man who’d never come to the city before. And so the local radio station said to people, upload your photos to flicker of things that you want to show the new man. And of course, rather than showing nice pictures of the suspension bridge, they took pictures of dog poo, mattresses, rubbish that hadn’t been picked up.
Claire Wardle:
And as a result of that, but the local council responded and it was a real participatory element that the local newsroom was facilitating. But by the time we got to 2013, 2014, news editors had figured out Facebook and Twitter and they’re like, “Oh great. It’s just another way for us to broadcast our content.” So then social media used by nutrients was artists like LeBron tune in, we’re going to be talking about the storm or even if you go to the New York Times Facebook page, they’re not really listening. They are broadcasting their content to the audience. So ultimately what this means is how do you really listen to audiences? How do you bring them in on this? How do we create a network of like information and ambassadors? Because if you spend time in anti-vax communities, they’re not sitting there just being like, “Oh, I’ve just read another conspiracy theory.” They’re reading the insets to vaccine medication, they’re reading the science, they’re making sense of the science in the wrong way, but they are very active and they feel like they’re part of the process.
Claire Wardle:
So how do we take that need that people have and figure it out around quality information? And I just don’t think, we’ve haven’t had to do that because for the last 100 years it’s been a broadcast model and it’s worked, the internet has made it participatory, but we haven’t shifted the ways in which we communicate.
Misha Zelinsky:
So should journalists be trained differently?
Claire Wardle:
Yes. Newsroom should be different. I mean, we have to think about the role of news, but it needs to be embedded in communities. Again, I remember in 2011, long time ago now, but there were London riots. I remember at the time the BBC was putting helicopters over the city and showing live footage of all of these fires. And then at the weekend there was all these think pieces in the Guardian and the Telegraph and Times, like, “Why were there riots bla, bla?” And all the community media outlets were like, “I’ll tell you why there were riots. If you’ve spoken to us over the last three months, you would have told you how black communities in particular in London were feeling completely ostracized. Nobody was listening to them and they were angry about this place.” They knew, but they weren’t listened to. And I think about that all the time still, which is we’ve got all of this money in these big news outlets, but they’re not connected to community at all.
Misha Zelinsky:
Well, just following up on that, I mean, because one of the biggest things that’s happened, there’s been the collapsing media, but everyone says, “Oh, we’ve also…” It’s the local newspapers that have gone or the state newspapers. You now have states that have no daily paper in the United States. I mean, do you think that that is where there’s no avenue for these voices? And so therefore there’s no local stories, local connection, that consequence has to be playing out the way you’re describing just now.
Claire Wardle:
Yeah. There’s no doubt that local news deserts, a part of the misinformation problem. In two ways is that if people don’t know a journalist, it’s good for search here, which is if you know a journalist and you see them down the path, you’ve got a higher view of journalism more generally. So if you don’t know a journalist, you’re less trusting of journalism in general. But secondly, it means that there’s no [crosstalk 00:25:18].
Misha Zelinsky:
I don’t know how much they trust you journalism but-
Claire Wardle:
It’s a good point. When there’s no oversight, you have more corruption. And we see that in local news deserts, we see corruption go up. So the more corruption there is, then people are less trusting institutions. So there’s a whole host of things there, but I would say, and then some good initiatives in the U.S. about plowing money back into the local news ecosystem. But I also don’t think we should just be propping up local news as is. So when people go, “Oh, why is Nextdoor so popular? Why is Facebook, local groups so popular?” Well, because it doesn’t just tell you about the school board. In fact, it doesn’t do that. It tells you why the local street light is out and it tells you there’s going to be a barbecue at the local public. It has all the things that people want.
Claire Wardle:
And it loads quickly and it doesn’t have pop-up ads. So it’s not a case of how do we just get more money? When you start to say, how are we completely rethink what local news should look like, but that’s difficult to do when you’ve got paper to put out. So we ended up with the status quo.
Misha Zelinsky:
Right. Before we go to social media, the last thing that I want to ask you about is in the traditional media space. I mean, up until now, we were all getting worried about, well, people are going to Fox News or to CNN or MSNBC and getting their news in that manner. The thing that strikes me since spending a fair bit of time in the United States now is basically anyone under the age of maybe 30, be certainly 25. Are streaming their news totally from other sources. They are not getting any traditional news. And so what’s the counting for that? And two, what’s the impact of that? Because that’s troubling to me, the facts is being spewed at them from unregulated.
Claire Wardle:
Yeah. No, I think you’re absolutely right. And I don’t think there has been a real reckoning with that generational shift. I mean, certainly when I was with the BBC back in 2009, they’re like, “Oh, the people that watch the 11:00 news and we’re over 70,” I mean, there was no awareness of how, I’m sure ABC has exactly the same conversations. The people who consume public service broadcasting and not going to be around forever. And I agree. I think it’s simplistic to say that young people don’t know what’s going on because they do, if you talk to them then [crosstalk 00:27:46].
Misha Zelinsky:
No, absolutely not. They definitely do. But they are not reading a newspaper. They’re not watching a television channel. It’s really quite a fascinating phenomenon.
Claire Wardle:
Yeah. So I think what needs more study is, I know young people who spend all day on Reddit and know all the intricacies and know everything, but then I also know young people from TikTok who are like, “I think Adam Baldwin just shot someone.” They know the headline version, but they don’t know the why. I think there’s something happening with Belarus. I couldn’t even find it on a map. So my worry is that on one hand they kind of know, but I still feel like that almost dangerous because they don’t know enough. So my worry is we have a generation of people you’re just used to reading the headlines or getting a 32nd TikTok video, but I think it’s very easy to just dismiss young people. But I do feel like it’s going to change the way that people understand the world around them. Not to say that reading a newspaper everyday was the answer, but it’s going to be a big shift.
Misha Zelinsky:
And so yeah, turning to the social media companies that are responsible for this, and I often reflect on how crucial this has all happened. I feel like, I’ve grown up where there wasn’t a social media, then there was social media as a fun thing. And we all, yeah, we sought up everything that was really fun. And then Obama won the 2008 election, partly by being really good on socials. And it was a feel good feeling, exactly eight years after that you got the Russian thing and then chaos since. What is their obligation to fix this? Because I think of it as like industrial England when you had the big changes, manufacturing. And well, if you like consumer goods, you going to have to put up with black skies, black ravers and child labor will say, “Well, actually we’d like both.” I mean, is that possible? Or can it not be regulated?
Claire Wardle:
I think you’re absolutely right though, that when people go, “Oh, how’s this happened?” It is like the introduction of the Gutenberg press. And there was like 100 year of war after that. To me, it’s exactly the same. We got so excited because you’re right, we had such tech utopia and we ultimately believe that connecting everybody was going to be the best thing ever. I mean, it’s almost like you not met a human, but because this technology only ever sits on top of people. And I remember talking to somebody who was a BBC journalist in India, three years ago when there was all the stuff about WhatsApp and mob violence. And he said, “When I watched WhatsApp in India, it reminds me of the role of radio in Rwanda.”
Claire Wardle:
It was like, it’s not what the technology it is like when you’ve got more violence driven by ethnic division, you will have violence, irrespective of whether it’s radio or WhatsApp, as humans that is what will happen. So I ultimately think we got so excited about the internet, but we completely forgot our history. And it was like, we were drunk for 10 years and just could only imagine this was going to be great. And it’s no surprise, no surprise should be no surprise to anybody. I’m annoyed that those of us who did come from a journalism research background, I mean, I remember at one point hearing about I know somebody who used to work at Facebook at the time and she was talking about Facebook Live and said, “If you’ve got any concerns,” I was like, “Oh my God,” if Facebook engineers spent anytime with foreign correspondents, they wouldn’t believe that Facebook Live was only going to be a place to stream your one year olds birthday party, they would have immediately said, “Facebook Live will be used for suicide bombings or terrorism, that is what Facebook like”
Claire Wardle:
So I’m kind of annoyed that we all got a bit seduced by many because we were burned. We’d have 9/11, the world looks really scary. And then the internet came along and we were like, “Ooh.” So when you talk about regulation, how much can you regulate human behavior? And that’s the fundamental issue here is that and we’ve seen, as the platforms have cracked down on misinformation, the bad actors have just shifted their tactics. So we see far less outright falses because Facebook takes that down now. So instead we have conspiracy theorists on Facebook being like, “I don’t know, I’m just asking the question about ivermectin,” knowing full well that doesn’t break Facebook’s guidelines, but they’re sowing a seed. They’re giving you a keyword now and you’ll go to Google and you’ll find a ton of stuff on Google about ivermectin.
Claire Wardle:
So the tactics have changed. So to me, focusing on content, isn’t the answer, focusing on the sources gets us some way there when we know bad actors who consistently push out bad content. But to me, we either say as a society, we don’t think anybody should talk about vaccines on Facebook because Facebook is not the place to have conversations about vaccines. And you just get rid of all conversation about vaccines. But I don’t think as a society, we want to do that. So I don’t think there is a clear regulatory answer. I do think governments need to require significantly more oversight on the platforms or the moment that they write their own transparency reports. When that’s nonsense like me marking my own homework, there should be an independent third party who’s out auditing algorithms, auditing search results, auditing all the stuff that journalists do a great job of, and then they go, “Oh, well, yeah, sorry. We’re not going to change because Wall Street journal suddenly exposed.”
Claire Wardle:
And the Facebook files and Francis Hogan, she doesn’t tell us anything that we didn’t know, but she provided some extra evidence, but it’s not like Facebook didn’t then put on an extra 9 billion or whatever they did that week. I mean, what’s really going to change? Because are people stopping using Facebook? No, they’re not and they are not going to stop unless there’s an alternative. And that alternative is going to struggle because you’d have to have all of my friends and interests and unless government said you-
Misha Zelinsky:
They’ll look at fake data.
Claire Wardle:
… import your own data. There are potential solutions, but the inertia of trying to change human behavior, I’m not very hopeful about that.
Misha Zelinsky:
What about some of the incentives that exist in social media, which essentially are about driving out rage and the content there is to get you to react emotionally. Is there a way that those can be changed to stop us immediately blowing up when we see something on there and then yeah, can the method and the response be dealt with? Or is that a human behavior question that can’t be dealt with?
Claire Wardle:
No, I mean, certainly there could be, if there was all detained algorithms that said, “Facebook, you need to dial back the fact that you’re putting so much weight on angry emoji.” So I run a nonprofit, we monitor misinformation. One of the things that helps us find it is that we felter by angry emojis on Facebook because the more angry emojis, the more you’re likely to find misinformation. So I think there is an argument to try and say to Facebook, “Pull that back.” But this whole debate, which is about filter bubbles. And if you talk to any engineer, at any social platform, they were saying, “Claire, we’ve run experiments when we try and give you and everybody else, the alternative side, you never click on that.” So let’s imagine I’m left-wing and Facebook decides to show me a story about how Obama was actually worse on immigration control and everybody thinks.
Claire Wardle:
Now if I’m from the left, I don’t want to click on that story because I don’t want to hear that about Obama. So that’s the problem here, which is for the platforms, they could be forced to tone down that, my fear is that if they turned me down so much, as humans, humans will find another platform, a more fringe platform where they can have that feeling again. And at the moment, they’ll go to Telegram or somewhere else.
Misha Zelinsky:
Right. What about what guys, we’re a very new phase of things. What about social norms? I’ve thought about like, we had all rules around you take your shoes off, coming into a house. I mean, you don’t share something that you haven’t read or it’s a sort of bad form.
Claire Wardle:
Yeah, I’m with you. I’m much more interested in those kinds of responses than I am technical. And yes, we need more from the platforms, yes we need more a side bla, bla, bla. But we are not going to get out of. We’re never going to solve this problem, but it’s like the pollution part of it. I have freckles, I go outside, I need to put on SPF. I just need to. And I live in an environment where the sun is probably going to kill me one day. So in the same way is like polluted information environment, how can we give skills to people to say, “When you go onto the internet, you are going to be bombarded with false information, as well as true information. You need to develop the skills, which makes you more resilient against the crappy stuff and better at spotting, the good stuff.”
Claire Wardle:
And social norms are part of that, which is, “Hey, you just shared something and you didn’t check it beforehand.” Or just like journalists that in professional embarrassment for journalist, if you share something that’s false, you have to have a correction on your story. How do we make people feel the same way about, hey, uncle Bob, you just did that, not that bad. But that’s going to take a long time to get there.
Misha Zelinsky:
And so just switching to… you’ve touched on it briefly, but what is First Draft doing, acting in this space? Yeah. It’s providing that social inoculations that people, the tools, what can we do and be delighted to hear about what you guys are doing?
Claire Wardle:
Yeah, I mean, we do research, but very much we’re a training organization, which nobody thinks that training is sexy. And there’s a lot of bad trading out that this one stand up, but ultimately we train journalists to write more responsible headlines and to protect themselves from being manipulated by bad actors, which is newsrooms are being weaponized by those who want to take advantage of that audience. So we do that kind of training. With public health officers, we help them think through effective communication. So they can help build trust with audiences even if they’re saying, “Hey, follow the science.” And with community-based organizations, we say, maybe you own a hair salon. Maybe you coach the local soccer team. Well now you actually have a position of trust in your small circle. So how can we work with you to ensure that you have accurate information?
Claire Wardle:
So we try and help all different parts of society. These are essentially trusted gatekeepers now, make sure that they know how to operate in this world of polluted information. So we don’t go to the public because who’s going to trust First Draft? But if I can train the person who is trusted, then my hope is that over time, again, our theory of change, which is a long one, it’s going to take a long time to get there. But the more people who know how to navigate this well, the better off we’ll be.
Misha Zelinsky:
What about things like it, I’ve read good articles talking about people having ownership of that data online. I mean, is that something that you think is probable? Because at the moment, the old adage here, if it’s free or the product. And we have no idea what company’s hold on us and how do we flip that around?
Claire Wardle:
Yeah. So I completely agree with that. I think a lot of media literacy training has been teaching people how to Google the headline and do a reverse image search and look at the about ads page before they share. What we’ve done a terrible job of is teaching people how algorithms shape what they see. So there are still so many people who are like, “Yeah, what’s amazing. The things I see on Facebook.” And I say, “Well, you see about 2% of all the things that you could see if you saw everything that everybody shared.” And I’m like, “Oh no, I see everything.” You don’t. Just teaching how algorithms work as part of this. And I’d also say about data. I did a research project a couple of years ago where in 14 countries we ask people to search for vaccine information, take a screenshot and then send it back to us.
Claire Wardle:
And one of the countries was Australia. And so when people search for vaccine information in Australia, the top one was an ad from the Australian government with quality vaccine information. And all these people wrote back, participants in the project. And like, “Why is my government having to use taxpayer dollars that they’re paying to Google to guarantee quality information at the top of the feed?” And I was like, “Great question.” And so the more we can get people involved in this, which is like, can we get people donating their data to science? Can we get people to download their own data and reflect on last week I did local… I don’t know if you’ve got an iPhone, Apple sends you a thing on a Sunday that tells you your screen time. That’s always a very sobering part of the week when I can see, it’s like what does that look like to reflect back on people the kinds of information they’re looking at?
Claire Wardle:
So I think there’s a lot we can do to bring the public into this conversation because they’re absent right now. And as you say, they are being used for their data, but with no real understanding of how they’re being used and what the impact is on their societies.
Misha Zelinsky:
And there’s other solutions that have been mooted in terms of yeah, because these companies, you can’t break up a Facebook in the way you could break up the railways. Because they’ve benefited from the scale. There’s no value to me being on a different Facebook to my mum. Or whatever I like that the network effect is the value. So is there a way that they should be taxed on the basis that they went out to either individuals or to NGOs and to create a more interesting with diverse instead, rather than these big dominant platforms?
Claire Wardle:
Yeah. I mean to the point of tax, there should be a massive pot of money from the tax that they’ve had to pay that would support proper media literacy initiatives, not little non-profits like mine, like nibbling at the edges, proper, global, real significant education that should, they should be paying for that. But I do also think public service, for example, the BBC or ABC, they created public service forecasting. What would it look like if we had a public service model of a social network? But it would need to be funded at such a level that it really could compete with the Facebooks of the world. And like I said, the inertia of trying to get people to move on to a new platform, we’d have to have the best engineers and whatever.
Claire Wardle:
But I think the idea of having more innovation in this space is a good thing. I think we got obsessed in 2008, 2009, like, “Oh, we’re in this period of innovation.” But actually all the social networks look pretty similar now it’s like, we now know what a social network looks like, but I do think, what does it mean to be able to take your data and move it somewhere else? What does it mean to have more niche, social networks? I don’t know. It’s an interesting one, but yeah, Mark Zuckerberg basically had 10 years when we were all asleep on the job and he created something so massive that now like you say. And we saw that with a six hour blackout, which helped Facebook.
Claire Wardle:
I mean, whether or not the conspiracies of they turned it off, but irrespective globally, people were like, “Contact my family. I can’t sell, a businesses floundering.” They are our communications infrastructure as much as we hate that. So he’s created something so massive. And even you hear him give congressional testimony, he uses China and artificial intelligence in a really strategic way. He’s like, “If you break me up, we won’t have the data that would allow us to compete with China.” So he’s a very smart cookie.
Misha Zelinsky:
Yeah. Again, I mean, I just feel that argument out a little bit. Yeah. Because just so people understand it’s about the data pools of valuables at the moment, China has no privacy and therefore they’re quantum computers are learning very quickly through these deep pools of data. And if we don’t have the same thing in the West, then we’re going to fall behind in AI. Again, that that worries me. Certainly we should be worried about the CCP, getting to AOI advantage over the West. Having said that, I’m not persuaded that democracy can survive. If the cure is burning the village to save it, then I’m not really persuaded by Mark’s argument I’m going to be honest. But I actually want to ask you a question about you’re a journalist by trade.
Misha Zelinsky:
One of the things that troubles me, I see a lot of it now and it’s really Tweeter specific, the way people are now targeting journalists on there that are just doing their job. And this tribalism. A politician that they like will get a tough question and they stack it on that person, or they don’t believe the interview was tough enough and they’ll stack on that journalist and it’s become about the journalists individually and journalists are getting pounded off platforms and even being threatened in the real world. So maybe you just talk a little bit about that and what we should.
Claire Wardle:
Yeah. I’m actually a researcher by training, but I spent a lot of time with journalists and certainly… In 2009 developed a training program for the BBC on how do you verify content? If somebody had told me 12 years later that the same journalists would now be harassed, terrified for the safety of their kids. I mean, it is extraordinarily scary out there, particularly being a woman and in a person of color absolutely. I mean, I’m teaching a class this semester and we had a conversation yesterday about whether they should go into journalism because a number of them were like, “Why would I choose this profession when it’s hard enough to do the job, but then you’re also signing up for this abuse and harassment.” But it, like you say, the internet allows people to find you. Previously, if you were a journalist, it would be very rare for somebody to knock on the door and be like, “Hey, you are a whatever.”
Claire Wardle:
But now it doesn’t take anything it’s anonymous. So I mean, there’s a lot of good work now with some nonprofits around coalitions to help protect journalists. Almost like a helpline that when they’re getting piled on, they can contact the platform and try and… I mean, the platform should be doing much more to protect journalists. And they’re not, they should be doing a lot more to protect the whole host of people and they’re not. But it is serious. And I think, unless you’ve been in the middle of one of these storms, you don’t realize how terrifying it is and, yeah, it’s a very sad state of affairs.
Misha Zelinsky:
Now, I’ve watched your TED Talks and you’ve given passion defenses of us being able to fix this and regulate this. I mean, are you still an optimist or you and I have had a previous conversation where you were getting more concerned about looking ahead and certainly U.S. democracy, 2024, what’s up ahead, after January 6th. I mean, are you an optimist that we can to go away out or are we on a burning platform or hill?
Claire Wardle:
I definitely think things are much, much, much worse now than I ever would’ve dreamed of in 2016 when I first started really thinking about these issues. But I still believe that we can dig ourselves out. My concern is that things could get really bad, really quickly in the next three to four years, which will make digging out impossible. I don’t want us to get to a point of no return. And I’ve said to you previously, I’m very worried in 2024, that if it’s a close election and it goes a certain way, the right will not accept the result and we could end up in a Civil War situation. I do not think that is outside the realms of possibility. Now that’s a terrifying bit because then the impact of this is so great that it’s going take years and years and years to get back.
Claire Wardle:
If we can avoid that, then I think there’s hope as long as we are much more aware of how long this is going to take, but also the seriousness of this problem, like I just said to you, millions have gone into misinformation the last five years, but it’s still nibbling around the edges giving little nonprofits, small grants. This has to be a global conversation because ultimately misinformation impacts democracy, health, climate, hates, it influences the ways that we operate as a planet. So to me and I know it’s a thing that I care about the most, but it requires such a response. It requires a global… We don’t need a UN agency for disinformation, but the absence of a global entity to really take this seriously and to do the proper levels of education.
Claire Wardle:
Without that, if we carry on this trajectory, be like, “Ooh, how much harm really? And we just need another study to find out whether it’s really harmful.” To me, those drips of water, just keep dripping every single day, low level, hate, conspiracy, misleading content. We are so busy trying to work out should we had a tag to it, but what’s happening is that the rock is slowly splitting and we can’t see that split. The historians will, but it’s like, we are just like, “Oh, how worrying is it really?” It’s really worrying.
Misha Zelinsky:
And so, I mean, look, just to build out your discussion about trying to get coordinated global. I mean the G20 was able to, or was able to get a minimum global tax agreement through, which was pretty profound. So, I mean, there is some hope, but one of the things that frustrates me when you hear Zuckerberg talk he’s like, “I’m happy to be regulated, but you tell me how to be regulated.” And there’s an asymmetry in terms how the regulators understanding how regulate, because the techs so complicated and then also pushing for a global solution is always a typical tactic of those seeking not to be regulated.
Claire Wardle:
Yeah. 100%.
Misha Zelinsky:
But nevertheless, I think you’ve touched on a couple areas that would help quite a bit. Now, I think you and I could talk about this forever in a day and it’s been enormously well, interesting perhaps troubling conversation, but now I have to do my typical clunky segue to a completely unrelated question, because I’m terrible host about barbecue at Claire’s. Now, you’re a foreign guest, you’re a Brit. So regrettably enough that’s you’re going to have three or Aussie three convicts at your barbecue up in Upstate New York. So who would they be? And…
Claire Wardle:
What I wouldn’t give for an Australian barbecue just very quickly, three of my best friends from university immigrated to Australia. So I hated Australia for a long time until I went and I was like, “How do I come?” Anyway… Well I grew up-
Misha Zelinsky:
Sorry. That’s okay. The Brits sent us to Australia as a punishment and it’s like, okay, right. You guys stay there. We’ll stay here, right?
Claire Wardle:
No, no, I know you did a good job there. But so I grew up, I was a child of the ’90s, so I watched Neighbors twice a day. I don’t know if you know, it used to run up in Britain.
Misha Zelinsky:
I know Neighbors well.
Claire Wardle:
Yeah. So I would watch that. And when I first went to Melbourne and it was cold and of course I didn’t take a coat because in Edinburgh it was never not sunny. So I’d have to invite Kylie because she’s such a legend. I’d have to invite Clive James who still grew up. He was always on the radio, though he was incredible and Julia Gillard, who I know is complex, but as a woman in the role that she was in. And when she made that speech, I think she’s incredible and I love her red hair. Yeah, it would be an interesting mix.
Misha Zelinsky:
Julia Gillard.
Claire Wardle:
And mind you Sarah Snoop, if I can have a fourth, I’d say Sarah Snoop, a Succession.
Misha Zelinsky:
You can have a fourth.
Claire Wardle:
Because I just love Succession right now. And she’s amazing in it.
Misha Zelinsky:
Is she Aussie?
Claire Wardle:
Yeah. Also another red hair person. So…
Misha Zelinsky:
Ah. All right. We’re building a theme here, so [Jul G. 00:51:17]. will feel like she’s at least in the majority there with a fellow invite. Well, look Claire, thank you so much for coming on the show. It’s been a brilliant conversation and good luck with everything you’re doing at First Draft. We’ll stick some information about First Draft in the show notes, but keep up the brilliant work and good luck with everything.
Claire Wardle:
Thanks so much. It was a pleasure to chat.
