A Landscape Analysis

The Fight Against Dis- information in the U.S. A Landscape Analysis OCTOBER 2018 Authors Heidi Legg, Director of Special Projects, The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School Joe Kerwin, Harvard College Senior, Dunster House Edited by Grace Greason, Harvard College, Sophomore, Lowell House The views expressed in Shorenstein Center Discussion Papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of Harvard Kennedy School or of Harvard University. Discussion Papers have not undergone formal review and approval. Such papers are included in this series to elicit feedback and to encourage debate on import- ant issues and challenges in media, politics and public policy. Copyright belongs to the author(s). Papers may be downloaded for personal use only. How is Disinformation Changing Us? The Fight Against Disinformation in the U.S.: A Landscape Analysis is a map of the disinformation initiatives currently in play to undergird newsrooms and improve media literacy at this challenging moment for the free press. Universities, platforms, foundations and private donors are all working to understand how a contagion spreads in this viral digital culture and to discover potential solutions. In an effort to discover who is stepping up, what they are doing and where they are making early headway, the work is organized into four categories: 1. Internal Platform Efforts, 2. Institutional Initiatives, 3. Upstart Initiatives and 4. Leading Funders. The iPhone is 10 years old, Twitter is 12 and Facebook is 14. History has shown that the medium is the message and that cataclysmic changes in how we communicate bring dra- matic shifts in our society. Now, a decade later, society has begun to ask, “how different is this moment in time from others?” Some have long predicted this change and their prescience is back in vogue. Neil Postman, a visiting Lombard Professor at the Shorenstein Center back in 1991, wrote: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Busi- ness in which he clearly described his concern for this new emerging world of pictures that led to this digital age. He feared the shift from text to pictures would fundamentally change the way we communicate and thus change our culture and politics. He believed this change in content and its form would drown us in a sea of irrelevance and kill any semblance of civil and intellectual society. In his seminal 1987 work, Postman carefully describes how culture and politics change dramatically with pivotal com- munication shifts. A headline last year in Paste Magazine asked: “Did Neil Postman Predict the The Fight Against Disinformation in the U.S. / October 2018 2018 / October in the U.S. Against Disinformation The Fight Rise of Trump and Fake News?” The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy / 2 Fast forward thirty years. This past February 2018, Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron referred to the prophetic quality of Postman’s book when he delivered the Reuters Memorial Lecture at the University of Oxford. Baron spoke of credibility and its measure in this current climate of disinformation, quoting Postman. “In the Age of Show Business, as Postman put it, credibility ‘does not refer to the past record of the teller for making statements that have survived the In the chaos, rigors of reality-testing. It refers only to the impression of sincerity, authenticity, polarization has vulnerability or attractiveness . .’” The track record of the teller and the rigors of emerged and reality testing appear more difficult than ever to measure as we wade through a pushed society to deluge of digital, celebrity-driven content across our multiple screens, 24/7. question, “what is As is often the case in a crisis, historians and journalists have begun to turn to historical context for reference at this critical moment for journalism, pointing to true?” information disorders that have come before. Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s new book These Truths: A History of the United States is a sweeping investigation into the American past that places truth itself at the center of the nation’s history. Craig Sil- verman, media editor at BuzzFeed News who carved out a very early beat in the disinformation space, reminds us that the original print newspapers were partisan and while bias and untruths are not new, our society has never experienced their deluge at such scale. He also cautions that something far more damaging is at play today. “It’s different when you can be put off into a filter bubble and that is all you get. It’s different when misinformation is flowing very rapidly through all those sites.” Columbia University’s Michael Schudson has long been ahead of this predica- ment for journalism asking the practice, “what is going to take the place of what is being lost, and can the new array of news media report on our nation and our com- munities as well as—or better than—journalism has until now? More importantly, what should be done to shape this new landscape, to help assure that the essen- tial elements of independent, original and credible news reporting are preserved?” He warns that what is under threat is independent reporting, particularly in the coverage of local affairs. Schudson has been sounding a bell for decades asking the news world to make wise choices at this pivotal moment in time. He believes these decisions will not only have far-reaching effects but if the choices are sound, significantly beneficial ones. The industry is listening as there appears to be an all hands on deck approach as we illustrate in this analysis. In the chaos, polarization has emerged and pushed society to question, “what is true?” In his talk at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago in Feb- ruary 2017, Silverman defines how he sees truth being assessed: “Whoever has the most people and activates them the most effectively determines what truth is.” Digital content is all about the number of viewers available to click. The difference from the age of the written word is that this digital content is so much easier to produce and the market for creating and consuming it is global in scale. According to Silverman, the meta-moment is not disinformation. He argues that disinformation is but a symptom of what many are now calling the emergence of a new dominant economy: the Attention Economy. An article published by The Atlantic called Where Has Teen Car Culture Gone? suggests a new economy is emerging, one moving away from the long-dominant oil economy. The writer ex- plains that today’s youth do not perceive the automobile as a path to freedom and way to connect with the outside world, but rather yearn instead for a series of The Fight Against Disinformation in the U.S. / October 2018 2018 / October in the U.S. Against Disinformation The Fight devices that can connect them to this new attention economy. With this enormous The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy / 3 If you do well, you get a check every month. At the core of it, attention is their crop. They are trying to harvest as much attention as they can possibly get “through Facebook and through other means to get that onto the page and the more page views they get, the more money they get. It doesn’t matter to them what it is. And it doesn’t matter if it’s true.” – Craig Silverman, media editor, BuzzFeed News shift from an oil economy to an attention economy, disinformation appears as by- product. Harvard Business School Professor Thales Teixeira defines the Attention Econ- omy using the core principle that consumers only have a fixed amount of attention to offer. With the advent of the internet came an explosion of information and content producers, all of whom now must compete for the same fixed resource. Given that the supply of attention is far outweighed by its demand, the price of attention “has skyrocketed in recent years,” Teixeira says. Many online content producers earn their revenue by hosting advertisements on their sites and gathering data, and this business model maximizes profit by collecting as much attention as possible. Emotional material that reinforces the reader’s preconceived political beliefs and opinions thrive. Accurate and balanced news content does not usually maximize attention. This new economy has led to an entirely new stable of workers from content makers to Search Engine Optimization strategists to data analytics miners. Sil- verman attempts to define the news sellers in this Attention Economy: “If you do well, you get a check every month. At the core of it, attention is their crop. They are trying to harvest as much attention as they can possibly get through Facebook and through other means to get that onto the page and the more page views they get, the more money they get. It doesn’t matter to them what it is. And it doesn’t matter if it’s true.” What has been revealed since the 2016 election is that there were many players involved in the sowing of disinformation, and some had exclusively economic motivations. Silverman reported that Macedonian content makers were running health sites before they realized they could make more money with Amer- ican politics. As producers saw that pro-Trump and anti-Clinton material secured more clicks, they created content accordingly. The Nieman Lab at Harvard reported in June 2018, that researchers at the Indi- ana University Observatory on Social Media “found that steep competition for the limited attention of users means that some ideas go viral despite their low quality—even when people prefer to share high-quality content.” This is disheartening when even in early 2016, a survey by the Pew Research Center in association with the John S.

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