If the authorities can’t satisfy the public’s desire to know more, others will fill the void with misinformation.
Health misinformation was one of the easier problems for platforms to take a stand on.
It had demonstrably negative downstream effects. In deciding how to surface health information, product managers and content moderators could look to scientific consensus—an option not available when judging political information. ~
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At least on health matters, the consensus of the most liked got a hard override: Queries about disease-related topics returned links to legitimate medical agencies, not to whichever anti-vax group had the most followers. Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook began to direct users to the WHO and the CDC, both for queries related to specific disease outbreaks and for vaccine information in general.
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The world is on the cusp of another high-stakes information battle: the one that will take shape surrounding the drug treatments and vaccines developed for COVID-19 over the next year.
The consensus of the most liked would have us believe that Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci are preparing to track us all by microchip; countering those narratives as they continue to take hold, mutating slightly to appeal to specific online subcultures, will not be easy.
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube bear significant responsibility for the information environment for which they are hosts, curators, and amplifiers. But they can only do so much. If institutions and authority figures don’t adapt to the content and conversation dynamics of the day, other things will fill the void.
The time for institutions and authorities to begin communicating transparently is before wild speculation goes viral. Preventing epidemics of misinformation from spreading is easier than curing them once they’ve taken hold.
theatlantic.com |
