The problem with the solutions to fake news — Part I

People know this is fake. Why would they still read it?

Despite all the ugly ramification of fake news, it has been heartening to see a herculean effort being amassed against it. The majority of efforts, however, have been directed at data, verification, and literacy.

What these solutions don’t seem to consider is our conceptual relationship with news.

Is the news still ‘the news’ to us? How do we interact, intellectually, emotionally and physically with news?

We’re all operating with the idea that people have the same idea of news as they have had in the past: news is the factual information about current events. Solutions to the fake news phenomena approach this problem with this conceptual framework.

Take this article from Jason Salowitz. I certainly do think there’s some good ideas in it. Jason’s clearly put a lot of effort into how the solution would work. In it, he discusses a way to “UX the F***out of Fake News”. He discusses a number of examples that could help users determine the validity of particular articles and news sources.

There’s also a number of organisations that are aiming to determine the validity of news stories and present this information to users: the Credibility Coalition and the Trust Project are working on ‘credibility indicators’. These indicators attempt to show how a validation engine would define how credible a new story and a news source is. Usually, this includes some sort of visual indicator to the user, noting that a particular news source is trustworthy, untrustworthy, or somewhere in between. Or, it shows a mark of authority, that a particular source is ‘trusted’. In this way, it’s sort of like an objective adjudicator of the news’ validity.

A screenshot from Joe Salowitz’s article about Fake News

But would these work? Would people trust, use, or even care about these indicators?

Facebook’s ‘disputed’ label

Jason and others see fake news framed within technology and reporting, not within the user/reader. In their eyes making it clear what news is credible, and what is not is the key to success. The experience, according to these and others, is predicated on the assumption that an abstractly assessed news source would be effective (and affective…) to the reader.

Yet this view does not take into the account the peculiarities of individual reader’s experiences. Would user’s trust these indicators themselves? Who is the arbiter of the indicators? Would users see bias in the indicators themselves and move to other platforms?

Imagine a steel-worker in Indiana, glancing at his phone, or a teenager in Newcastle, or a water carrier in Gujarat — would each of them truly understand, care about, or engage in the intended way with the status indicators of a particular article?

But more than that, would they believe trust/credibility indicators ? In an article in Vanity Fair, Maya Kosoff talks about hyper-partisan fake news articles:

But the very readers such articles are aimed at — those who subscribe to the theories they disprove — are arguably the least amenable to them. If a reader has already decided to trust a site like [Alex] Jones’s over The New York Times, for example, then Snopes’ efforts will do about as much to sway them as Facebook’s new trust indicator.

Do we honestly believe that most people are going to dig down into understanding trust indicators, into believing them, or are they more likely to just ignore them and click ‘post’?

These are explicit challenges that need addressing.

We have to start addressing them by considering the way we engage with the news. Each of us creates our news bubble: The idea of a ‘daily me’ — of a newspaper customised to a person’s individual needs — has been around a long time. However that concept has gone off the deep end — we now have the capability to control our feeds of information to the degree that we can largely exist solely in echo chambers.

But our individualised news experience is more than just a filter, a ‘daily me’.

If we drill down past the idea of a personalised filter to the theoretical underpinnings of what is happening in a user’s experience of news we can get a better perspective of how we engage with the news, and what factors solutions to the fake news phenomena we need to consider.

Let’s start by establishing the structure of this underpinning, as I see it, then dig down into it. Here it is, in a sentence:

The news is part of our tightly bound ecosystem of knowledge……

so we don’t make particular intentions to look at the news……

meaning news providers begin to alter their news accordingly……

so we in turn conceive of the news itself differently……

and begin to define ourselves in the news.

Let’s break that down:

The news is part of our tightly bound ecosystem of knowledge…

We like to think of the news as an abstract entity which we intentionally engage with.

But consider the last time you checked Twitter, Facebook or Google anything. It was likely part of your ambient level behaviour, like sipping a coffee or checking the time.

In this way, we build up technological and informational ecosystem for ourselves that is quite literally a part of ourselves. Like a lost limb, a lost phone is a incessant, noticeable absence. Our phones, which have news as part of their techno-social structure, are embedded in our daily behaviour. Our daily behaviour is thus indistinct from a web of information, and of feeds of information. When we want any information we have it directly at hand.

…so we don’t make particular intentions to look at the news…

What does it mean if it is embedded in our daily behaviour?

It means that we consume news differently.

Previously we would have to make conscious efforts to pick up a newspaper, or turn on the television. Even on the web, prior to social media, we would have to explore news websites. Now, the degree to which you need to decide that you are ‘looking at the news’ is of an extremely low order. Indeed, absent mindedly looking at a gadget in your pocket, seeing the headline of an email newsletter, receiving a Whatsapp message with a link from a friend or any other numerous, highly passive events can be considered being exposed to — and digesting — news.

…meaning news providers begin to alter their news accordingly…

Individualised information ecosystems have changed how news is presented and structured. News articles are increasingly brief, with bullet points bringing the facts to the fore, and videos reducing the need to even read. But beyond that, news consumption is regulated in a piecemeal disconnected fashion, with ‘news’ being headlines (many people don’t click on the full article — I’m not going to link any studies here, it’s really depressing — there are just so many), tweets, editorials, or vlogs. Beyond that, news is filtered and editorialised by our friends, family and strangers. Media has atomised into a wide array of formats such that it’s difficult to discern what news is and what news is not.

…so we in turn conceive of the news itself differently…

It’s one thing if we have a different relationship to the news, it’s another if we think about news differently.

Because of the piecemeal nature of the news and because it is so embedded in our lives, we begin to conceptualise news differently.

Think about it like this: Your email client, when you first used it, might have been perceived as simply a receptacle of communication. Certainly that’s how most people perceived it. However, through your usage of this email (especially work email), you may come to associate each email as an item that needs doing. In this way, your email may be perceived to you not as a receptacle of information, but as a to-do list. Google is clearly aware of this, with reminders, theme bundling and checkboxes all forming a structure closer to a to list rather than a communication mechanism.

This is called enactive cognition, our doing with something changes how we think of that thing. In the case of the news — the ‘doing’ is simply being a person. We conceptualise the news through our repeated access to it, given it is an embedded, atomised element in our ecosystem. Simply because it is consumed and situated in our lives differently from the broadsheet stack landing on our doorstep, we think of it in a functionally very different manner.

So in this way we’ve started thinking of the news not as news but as something else. But what?

…and begin to define ourselves in the news.

Let’s consider.

We’ve said how people curate their information ecology to be what they want. What do people want? To be the people they want to be.

The news, as it stands, is an expression of self. This ‘self’ is validated through your everyday actions. How you in-group identify: what you wear, what you like and the books you read are all expressions of who you are but more importantly who you see yourself as. What tweets you read, who you follow, what news you agree with, how you feel when you read posts, what you ignore — all of these embedded activities are solidifying you as a person.

This is know as self-categorisation. We accentuate the differences between our group — how we identify — as well as the similarities within our group. The self categorisation is dependent on the situation, however. If I’m a cardiologist and in a room with another cardiologist and an ophthalmologist, I’ll identify as a cardiologist. But if a lawyer enters the room, I’ll be more inclined to categorise myself with the other two medical professionals as ‘doctor’.

Self-categorisation comparison effect

As our groups get tighter so does ‘who we are’. The points of comparison to others become hot button issues — easily identified shibboleths in the form of key words: Trump, SJW, woke, rape culture (and different keywords for different countries, cultures and subcultures). These and numerous others either in themselves are identifiers, or are representations of two sides.

So, within my information ecosystem, I am constantly exposed to expressions that are in opposition to my ‘self’ category. Normally, it’s easiest to simply cull those feeds, those that are the flag bearers of the ‘other side’.

The media acutely preys on this by aligning itself with categories and writing headlines and stories that are biased against outgroups.

It’s incredibly difficult not to have an opinion on these atomised micro-dialectics that enter your information ecosystem on a minute-by-minute basis, are filled with vitriol, signalling and feedback mechanisms.

That opinion, that expression, makes the news a tool of our expression.

So, in review, reworded a bit differently than before:

• The ‘news’ as it stands is embedded in our everyday activity in tight but rich information ecosystems
• Which require very little intention to look at
• Meaning news accords itself with this embeddedness and low intention-activity
• So we think of news differently
• And see ourselves categorised and defined through and in the news

What’s being discussed here is by no means ground-breaking. Indeed, it’s well know (I’m merely attempting to pull some threads together) but not well applied, especially with regards to the fake news phenomenon.

Just recently an extremely important and valuable report from the Shorestein Centre on fake news was released that repeated many of the points I make here:

…we must recognize that communication plays a fundamental role in representing shared beliefs. It is not just information, but drama — “a portrayal of the contending forces in the world.

This tribal mentality partly explains why many social media users distribute dis-information when they don’t necessarily trust the veracity of the information they are sharing: they would like to conform and belong to a group, and they ‘perform’ accordingly

Check them out — they do good work

This is why it seems problematic to call this phenomena a ‘filter bubble’: It doesn’t describe the full breadth of precisely the phenomena at work here. What that term does illustrate though is the nature of the problem: you can’t gently break a bubble. Once it pops, the whole thing disappears — but popping the whole thing would cause chaos, it would mean effectively destroying the news. A key then, is to consider how this ecosystem, this bubble, could be massaged such that users could be exposed to more credible information.

So what’s the solution?

We must consider how the news fits into users’ information ecosystems. Solutions must sit within our ecosystems, and not be abstracted away from them. Solutions also must:

• Involve little to no effort on the part of the reader to understand. The best solutions should be largely indistinct from the news itself in terms of implementation.
• Mesh well with the experience of the news. Solution frameworks should engage the reader in a similar manner as the news.
• Be embodied in a way that is both easily understandable and easily to conceptualise for the reader.
• Not require the understanding of new mental models or actors that could provoke questions of authority and trustworthiness for any new concepts involved in the solution framework.
• Fit in with reader’s associative group structure

It’s excellent that there are so many efforts to fight fake news. Many of these, such as the Credibility Coalition, The Trust Project and others are well structured and thoughtful. Yet most don’t seem to be taking into account the life-embedded nature of news.

I believe this requires careful UX design adhering to the principles I discussed, and I will discuss how this could look in Part 2.