101 Sacha Altay and the misinformation circus

Sacha Altay is a post-doctoral fellow working on misinformation, trust, and social media in the Digital Democracy Lab at the University of Zurich. We sat down with him to discuss the perception of disinformation, the failed attempts of self- and co-regulatory frameworks that try to limit the its spread and the way we should be addressing this problem.

Transcript of the episode:

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00:00:06 Domen Savič / Citizen D 

Welcome everybody. It’s the 25th of June 2024, but you’re listening to this podcast episode of Domen Savič / Citizen D podcast on the 15th of July same year.

With us today is Sacha Altay, postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford within the Reuters Institute working on misinformation, trust and social media. So of course we’re going to talk about football. That’s a little opening joke. So welcome, Sasha. Thank you for being with us.

00:00:38 Sacha Altay 

Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m not with the Reuters Institute anymore, now I am at the University of Zurich. I was, you know, in Oxford last year.

00:00:45 Domen Savič / Citizen D

OK, excellent, things change so fast. And speaking of you working in the field of psychology and disinformation and trust in social media and so forth.

It seems that our world nowadays seems to run on disinformation in various areas. You have disinformation in politics and economy and environment and public health. There are numerous attempts in the EU, in the US, all around the world to sort of level out the playing field for the media consumer, you have regulatory attempts, self-regulatory protocols, increased efforts in education.

My opening question to you would be how did we get here? Was it always like this or did something change in the recent past so that disinformation became so prevalent and so influential in so many areas of our lives?

00:01:49 Sacha Altay

So, I’m going to answer this question first by talking about how people talk about it rather than whether there is more disinformation or misinformation today than before. Just how do people talk about it and whether people talk about it more today than before?

And I think it’s pretty clear when you look at the scientific literature or the number of news articles published or Google searches, that people are more interested in myths and disinformation or conspiracy theories now than before. And by now, I mean broadly, after the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit in the UK. After these two major events, interest in misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theory really spiked both in the news headlines, in intellectuals’ circles, as well as in scientific research.

And I think clearly the COVID-19 pandemic, where the director of the World Health Organization, said that, you know, there was an infodemic, like a lot of misinformation about COVID-19 etc. So, I think interest also piped during that time and more recently very recently with the release, or at least the democratization of the ChatGPT and worries about the power of generative AI.

There have been new fears again about the impact that generative AI may have on elections. For instance, during the 2024 elections that are being held almost everywhere around the world. So, I think, yeah, clearly people are more worried about it. Recently at the World Economic Forum, for instance, missing misinformation was considered the number one risk in the next two years for democracies in front of climate change in front of war in front of any other risk. So clearly people, scientists and leaders are very worried about it, and I think it’s unprecedent.

But of course, we don’t have very good data. About 100 years ago, we were also extremely worried about this stuff. I doubt it, but if it’s possible, we don’t have very good data on it. But let’s say at least that yeah, now we are very worried about it, more than in the past as we can document it.

00:04:13 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Would you say that these threats or the perception of threats of this and misinformation are credible? So, is it really that big of a problem then, like the media and the politicians and everybody I guess is saying?

00:04:28 Sacha Altay

Yeah, because I’ve talked about perceptions. Now let’s look at the evidence. Let’s say that before 2016 there was some work on it, but the work was quite limited compared to today, and I think that since 2016 there has been a lot of great empirical work to look at.

The prevalence and impact of miss or disinformation, and most of this work, at least in Western democracies, like the US or Western, Europe has shown that mis- and disinformation is very, very small.

It’s consumed by a very small number of people who have pre-existing attitudes that basically predispose them to consume and accept the messages in the mist and disinformation. So, in the US, for instance, we know that it’s mostly, I don’t know, for Trump supporters that are consuming mostly for-Trump misinformation, and you can say the same for the other. It’s the same the other way around, so that’s what we know because we know that the average news consumer doesn’t consume or even stumble upon much misinformation. So that’s that has been well established.

And regarding the impact, it’s a bit trickier, but all the attempts we’ve done suggest that the effect is small and smaller than most other things like even just following the news like of course, when you follow the news, you get more informed about what happens in the world. But you also may develop some biased perceptions of the world because of course, the news doesn’t cover everything perfectly and they are not completely neutral etcetera.

So let’s say that the impact of mis- and dis-information is very small compared to just media bias effects and of course a lot of people just don’t consume the news and just not very interested in the news or politics and so are just broadly, uninformed about many of these things, and this has a much stronger impact than misinformation could ever be.

00:06:24 Domen Savič / Citizen D

So, it sounds like we don’t have a problem there.

00:06:30 Sacha Altay

I mean the way I see it is that we have problems. For instance, I don’t know, we have people who deny that climate change is happening and that it’s human cause. And I think it’s a problem that people disagree with, that it’s a scientific fact that has been established people disagree with. It’s a problem.

And these people will also say that they believe in misinformation, etc. And so, I think often people jump to the conclusion that “people who vote for populist leaders also believe in fake news”. It must be because of false news that they vote for populist leaders or like the same for Brexit, for Trump, etc. All these people, they say they believe in fosters. And so, I think we tend to attribute this bad stuff to false information, and I think false information is most often a symptom of other problems.

For instance, we know that at the country level in countries with more corruption like I don’t know, countries in the Middle East compared to northern Europe, countries in the Middle East are more corrupted than countries in northern Europe like Denmark and belief in conspiracy theories is much higher in like the Middle East than in Denmark, for instance.

And that’s because it makes sense to believe that elites are corrupt or competing against people in corrupt countries. So, there is some rationality to it. And we also know that people who distrust institutions for various reasons, some good, some of the, the less good, are more likely to believe in misinformation, conspiracy theories… literally because they are looking for information that goes against the establishments against institutions, and sometimes people are warranted to do so.

But let’s say that in Western democracies, where elites are often right, it leads to bad, bad outcomes.

00:08:15 Domen Savič / Citizen D

So, you would say that that this whole, let’s say one of the main reasons or important reasons for the prevalence of let’s say belief in disinformation is actually decrease in trust towards let’s say public institutions, governments, mass media outlets and so forth.

00:08:37 Sacha Altay

I think it depends. I think, I don’t know, for instance, in times of war, I don’t know if you look at Russian propaganda, some of the best predictors of believing in Russian propaganda is identifying strongly as Russia. And I don’t know, believing in the Great Russia narrative, for instance, that you want a great Russia. So, you’re going to buy the Russian propaganda.

But if you’re Ukrainian and have a Ukrainian identity, you’re not going to believe any of the of the Russian propaganda. So, in that case, it’s mostly about identity and I think most of the time identity plays a very important role. People believe stuff that aligns with identity, people and various identities.

You can have political identity, national identities, many kinds of identities. But yeah, as you mentioned, I think at least for conspiracy theories, they are often constructed really in opposition to events that are covered in mainstream news.

And they very rarely come up with their own stuff. Most often they just look at what’s happening in the news, and they say that’s false. It’s actually something else that’s happening. But what they mostly do is they wait for mainstream news to do something, and then they say, oh, it’s actually the opposite. And so, I think in that case, for conspiracy theories trust in institutions is, yeah, a very strong picture.

But if you look at other stuff, like for instance naturopathy or alternative medicines, then it’s mostly distrust of health institutions, not political institutions for instance. But yeah, trust is key to understanding belief in misinformation.

00:10:11 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Do you have any thoughts on the general distrust phenomenon? If you look at the way or if you look at all the areas that disinformation is rampant in, it’s basically you know, we don’t trust literally anything, right. We don’t trust the as we said, the governments, we don’t trust the media, we don’t trust the researchers in the field of yeah, environment and other issues. So why is this mistrust so prevalent?

00:10:46 Sacha Altay

I don’t know.  I think it’s complex. It depends on the context. I think one potential explanation is that it’s hard for us to evaluate how trustworthy many institutions are, even evaluating how competent some people are.

For instance, when I tell people that they do behavioral sciences, a lot of people don’t even know that it exists. Basically, you can study human behavior in a scientific way because for them science is mostly about, I don’t know, biology, geology, physics. And so, I think now the division of cognitive labor, like how experts, people can be, is extremely high in today’s society.

So, I think we have trouble understanding, you know, how experts. Some people are on vaccines, on GMOs, on nuclear energy or stuff like that, and that it really goes beyond our own experience and that basically with our own eyes. Or our own brain, our own experience, we cannot come up with conclusions to write about this and we need to trust other people.

But then we need signs that we can trust them, and often we don’t see these people, they don’t talk to us. They are far away. They may be anonymous. They may have weird names. And so, we I think it’s hard to trust people that far away and so that may be one reason but honestly, its they are there are many different reasons.

For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the authorities in many countries did not communicate well about guidelines about scientific evidence, and so it forced the distrust. They also had some measures that were very restrictive and then not restrictive, and all that a lot of people didn’t like that, and it affects trust, so there are there are many ways to lose trust and one thing is that it’s easier to lose trust than to gain it. So that’s why also institutions etcetera need to be careful because they can very easily lose people’s trust.

00:12:45 Domen Savič / Citizen D

So, what does that tell us about, let’s say the countering of disinformation pandemic or infodemic. So, are these attempts of, let’s say, regulation, co-regulation, fact checkers, everything that’s been going on since, let’s say, yeah, since the election of Trump… are these countermeasures sort of focusing on the right problem? Are they addressing the issue or are they mostly greenwashing?

Greenwashing in the simplest of terms, saying “Ohh, you know, people are dumb because they believe disinformation, and now we just have to give them knowledge or science and everything will be OK.”

00:13:33 Sacha Altay

I mean, I think these people mean well most of the time and in my opinion, I think many of these measures like fact checking labels etc… They mostly target the symptoms, and they can help a little bit. I mean I’d rather have sack checks than have no fact checks.

I think it’s a good thing that they are fact checkers, it’s just that we need to not lose track of the bigger picture and remember that fact checks are effective at correcting misperceptions, but they are they are not effective at changing people’s minds about who to vote, how they feel about some politicians and so that that that’s a problem like you can fact check as many as Trump’s statement as you’d like, people are still gonna vote for Trump if they have some pre-existing values, attitudes and reasons to vote for Trump, and we need to understand why some people are attracted to populist leaders to, I don’t know, people who prone anti vaccine stuff.

We need to understand the reasons why that’s the case and so that that way I’m just worried sometimes when leaders think that, yeah, if we address the disinformation problem, the deeper problem are going to go away, like populism is going to go away with fact checking.

I mean, no other thing is really defending that. But I think we need to keep track of that there are some deeper factors that affect this, and we need to target them. Some of them may be, yeah, lack of trust or polarization, just how people feel about political opponents, etc.

And then of course, there are some even deeper factors that I mentioned. Corruption, inequalities, poverties. There is stuff like that that do affect belief in misinformation. And of course, I’ve been advocating to target this because if we reduce inequality or if we reduce poverty, it will have all the benefits, then reducing misinformation.

00:15:27 Domen Savič / Citizen D

But that’s hard, right?

00:15:30 Sacha Altay

Yes, of course. But I think it’s something we need to be clear about is that there is no easy solution. There is no technological fix that will solve these problems. There is no magic solution or whatever, like it’s a tough problem because social political problems are often very complex and populism, anti-science attitudes et cetera are not going to go away with fact checking or media literacy.

00:15:54 Domen Savič / Citizen D

But so. So, we’ve just had the EU election, right. And did you feel… I’m coming from Slovenia, you’re now based in Switzerland. Did you feel the debates, the discussions before the election sort of highlighted these issues that are that are that are underlying the disinformation pandemic?

Did you have the feel of political representatives really knowing what’s going on in regard to as, as we said before, crisis, lack of trust in in several different areas for them to sort of change the way we’re addressing this issue as we move yeah, into a new European Commission mandate?

00:16:42 Sacha Altay

I’m not sure. I’m not sure, to be honest, I’ve not followed it very closely, but I’ve seen a lot of technological solutions being proposed. I mean, I’m not thinking about the elections right now, but stuff like adding labels on social media to say that it will hurt your mental health or holding tech companies accountable and it’s good to hold them accountable.

But I think a lot of solutions are a bit too focused on technological fixes and not enough on the functioning of democracies, institutions and deeper factors, but often as politicians, it’s easier to blame Mark Zuckerberg or big tech and say that you’re going to go against big tech than to say that the problem is politicians lying or pushing lies or instrumentalizing some facts or political.

00:17:35 Sacha Altay

I think it’s easier for them to blame big tech than themselves and the system, so no, I’m not sure there has been really a wake up call.

00:17:50 Domen Savič / Citizen D

And what are your thoughts on on exactly this issue of this techno deterministic solutionism, that tech is is the problem, but at the same time, it’s also the the grand solution to to every problem that that we have what what is fueling this idea or this way of of proposing solutions in in in this area?

00:18:17 Sacha Altay

I mean, I’m not totally sure I’m more and more interested in in this area and the more I read about it, the more I realize that we have always done that as humans to blame new technologies for so many problems, like we’ve blame writing for losing our memory.

Like if we if we write, we don’t need our memory anymore with blame books for disconnecting us from reality, we blame every new technology for many reasons that now we would consider very silly.

But at the time we took it, at least some people took it seriously and pushed it. But no, I’m fascinated by why we do so. In France, for instance, at the last year’s election, the extreme right party did well and a lot of commentators they’re saying that it’s because of TikTok.

It’s these stupid kids basically on TikTok being influenced by a young leader and of course it’s a very simplistic explanation that contradicts most of what we know about the effects of mass communication and how people use new technologies and how people decide for who to vote.

But for some reason these are very, very attractive and we tend to always blame the same people. It’s like young people who have this weird new information technology, tick tock or whatever and that may explain why they are different from us and do stuff that we don’t understand. So, I’m not sure why there is this focus on technology… there are many theories. Some say that yeah, it’s intentional. It’s like politicians, for instance, pushing these narratives so that we don’t blame them, but I think also these explanations tend to be quite intuitive, like a lot of people don’t really know what TikTok is. They think it’s just young people who dance. And if suddenly you have politics, then people may be influenced by it.

Because in psychology there’s this well-established finding that we tend to overestimate how much people are influenced by bad media effects like advertisement, propaganda, etcetera? We tend to say no, I’m not so much influenced by it, but other people, and especially by political opponents, are extremely influenced by it. So, I think, yeah, we have this tendency to think that. So, these explanations are very, very intuitive and most people of course are not super interested in the truth. So, for them the job is done.

You know, why did Trump get elected? Well, because they watch Fox News and they are a bit stupid, and they’re not very well educated and then they hope this is the end of the explanation. And so, the problem is Fox News and of course Fox News maybe a bit problematic, but removing Fox News will not remove populism. I think it’s also a bit of laziness to some extent.

00:20:55 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Hmm. So, addressing this issue moving forward, then we can also talk about not just the co-regulatory practices or the regulatory practices, self-regulation, whatever, but also about media literacy, about training, about changing the way people interact with media outlets or with the social media and other informational faucets so.

So how would how would you what needs to be done or what would you do to sort of change, change the tie the tide of this, yeah, of this stalemate where you always have, you know, fact checkers playing whack a mole with, with the disinformation spreaders.

00:21:44 Sacha Altay

I’m not sure. It’s also why a lot of people don’t like my work is that I also don’t have solutions to to offer because the problem is very complex and I’m just advocating for realization that the problem is complex, then the solutions that a lot of people are offering that are very, very small set and are not going to save the world.

But at least when it comes to media literacy, I think a lot of the media literacy programs, they assume that people are gullible and too trusting, whereas we know that a lot of people are either just completely uninterested in the news and avoid it altogether, or do not trust the news and start from basically cynicism instead of gullibility.

And so, I think it would be perhaps more interesting to try to foster interest and trust in reliable information, not necessarily the news, but also some news influences, Wikipedia or high-quality sources of information in general, rather than to alert people about misinformation like they did during the COVID-19 instead of saying there is misinformation everywhere, be careful, say look there is reliable information and you can find it here and you can trust us for these reasons and we are being transparent and we are being accountable etc.

So yeah, I’ve been advocating for that for this shift in focus. But again, I don’t think it’s going to necessarily have huge effects. It’s just a small, small change intervention that already has small effects.

00:23:21 Domen Savič / Citizen D

So, is there a cause and effect of these underlying reasons that are that are then birthing the era of disinformation? Would you say, if you look back at, let’s say historical developments moving, past Trump, but by going further down the line? What caused this or what are some of the happenings that pushed us into the situation that we that we have today?

00:23:55 Sacha Altay

I mean, I’m not sure, to be honest, I’m not exactly sure it’s often very complex and I’m not an expert in the rise of populism in the US or the rise of anti EU sentiment in in the UK. It’s some people are experts in this domain and I don’t think they have clear answers.

So no, to be honest, I don’t know. It’s just complex. I just know that information and information practices often downstream of attitudes and values and political identities and stuff like that and so, they rarely play an important causal role.

They are most often there to, like, rationalize people’s attitudes and behaviors. But no, I’m not sure why populist leaders are rising in the world, and why Trump got elected, and why the Brexit happened. It’s complex, I’m not sure.

00:24:53 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Do you think it has something to do with role separation? So this is partially my theory, or this is something that I subscribe to, looking at this field from, let’s say the disinformation researcher, but also from someone who’s focusing on media literacy and is interacting with people on on this issue.

Coming from Slovenia, let’s say from the Balkan region, Central Europe, whatever it is, it almost seems like that that on one side nobody wants to talk about political engagement or the role of a citizen, because this has some bad connotation moving backwards to Yugoslavia or the east versus West.

But at the same time, everybody’s emphasizing this individual role of a consumer that you are in charge of everything. You vote with your wallet basically, and you’re the one who’s making things happen, right. And then at the same time, every time something, let’s say, bad happens, everybody’s escaping the responsibility or part of their part of responsibility of certain issues, be it surveillance, be it disinformation, be it anything or everything else that’s happening around us.

00:26:20 Sacha Altay

I mean, I’m not sure, to be honest. Because you’re saying that there’s been a shift in seeing consumers, the information consumer…yeah, I’m not so sure.

0:26:40 Domen Savič / Citizen D

It’s just, thinking about it, seeing how how people on one side they recognize that the problem, let’s say of disinformation or issues related to this information s very broad and very composed out of different outlets and at the same time they want, as you said, this techno deterministic solution. Just push of a button and and everything will go away, right?

And then maybe if we if we move on to let’s say the relationship between politics, between party politics or governments and disinformation, would you say there is a link between those two? Or should we focus or should we talk about this information in connection with, let’s say, political agendas and other? Yeah, other yeah, with things related to politics. Or is this completely separated? Are these two issues completely apart?

00:27:50 Sacha Altay

No, no, of course they are very much related in the case of disinformation. So like false or misleading information spread with the intent to cause harm. Very often it’s spread by government or like foreign governments, for instance, doing like information operations and so they are clearly political.

Like, I don’t know, increasing polarization within the society, reducing support for some states, or increasing support for some other states. So there are some clear political actors behind disinformation campaigns, that that’s for sure. In the case of misinformation, not all misinformation is related to politics.

But let’s say that scholars have focused more on political misinformation than other types of misinformation. For some reason, it’s not totally clear why some people think it’s more impactful, even though others have agreed.

I have argued that health misinformation is also probably problematic, and that we should focus a bit more, but yeah, a lot of misinformation, at least misinformation that matters, and that people see and that has the potential to be impactful is spread by politicians because they do have a wide coverage, and sometimes they even do so in the media.

When Trump was in power in the US and he clearly spread a lot of falsehood through mainstream media because he’s the president and the news have they have to cover him and sometimes he tells lies and that was a difficult situation, but of course, in general politicians instrumentalized facts or spread lies to gain supporters to political gains in general.

So, and of course, not all politicians do that, but many people have agreed that when politicians do it, it’s more problematic than when a random user with 300 followers does it because of course the impact is not the same, and because politics can have an impact even if people don’t really believe it.

For instance, if Republicans in the US say that they are against masks, then Republicans in the US can use a mask as an identity factor. They can say, oh, I’m not wearing masks so that I identify as a as a Republican and then it becomes this bookmarker, this party line and then people wear, not wear masks, just to identify like that. Even if they don’t really, even if they have nothing against masks. So that’s problematic.

00:30:30 Domen Savič / Citizen D

And focusing on, you’ve mentioned it a few times, the role of mass media, right? So, on one hand you have the theory of media watch, public watchdogs of the fourth estate. On the other hand, you’ve just mentioned that you have them as megaphones that are amplifying, let’s say the dis- or misinformation conspiracy theories. How do you see the role of mass media in all of this? Are they friends or enemies of the people?

00:31:02 Sacha Altay

I mean, first I’d like to say that the news media plays a very important role still, despite the rise in social media, despite the advent of like the Web 2.0 and everyone being able to be a content creator, etc. We know that when people consume news, they still are mostly turn to mainstream media so they still play a very important role and then the question is, are they friends or enemy?

I think it depends on the context and the country. I’d say that in Western democracies where there is a strong public media ecosystem that’s free and has money to do good work in the UK with the BBC, for instance. Then I think they have a good media ecosystem and that the news is mostly friend, even though for instance in the UK there are also a lot of tabloids that probably don’t help people being informed that much if not create a bit biased perception.

But overall on average, let’s say that in countries like the UK, the news is a friend in the sense that on average they help people being more informed about what’s happening in the world and perhaps make more informed decisions and be better citizens. But then in other countries, I don’t know, like of course, obviously like China for instance.

Many news outlets are controlled more or less by the state and are not totally free to do what they want or like in Russia, or to some extent in in India. In these countries it’s not totally clear whether the news is a friend or an enemy.

Because if you’re if your friend of the government and the government is a is a dictator dictatorship, then of course you’re not serving the people, but you’re just serving the the the regime.

And in countries like the US, for instance, where they don’t have a strong public service media on average, let’s say it’s all right following the news in the US is better than totally not following it, but it’s also less good than than I think in other countries like like the UK or France.

So it depends. And of course there are some good news outlets. There are some bad ones and and and of course they it’s hard for user outlet to give a completely perfect representation of reality and cover topics fairly and satisfy all audiences. And so I think they have, they have a lot of work to do and then they should do it better, but I think a lot of them are trying.

Trust in the news has been declining at least a little bit in the in the last 10 years, but more the the largest drop has been in interest in the news, where people just are less and less interested everywhere in in the news and participation with the news. So just like talking about the news sharing news online etc.

I have done some work on it and it’s declining in many countries, so people are just turning away from the news, but hopefully we can create a new form of news that attracts people and that interest people. And I think there are a lot of benefits or at least potential gains in like news influencer like on TikTok.

In France, for instance, we have Hugo decrypt, the news influencers that do a very good job at summarizing what’s going on. And they also have deeper explainers and I think it better fits how new, how young people consume news and information in general online, so the news also needs to adapt to its audience and be better to gain trust.

00:34:33 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Just to follow up… What do you think are some of the reasons the people stop engaging with with mass media or with, with, with news outlets? Is there something like you can or we can point a figure at and say, OK, it’s this, it’s this or it’s just yeah, a complex situation that you can’t really describe?

00:34:55 Sacha Altay

There’s a lot of work on that and there are some clear reasons that come up all the time. One of them is that the news is too negative and it brings down people’s mood.

It happened, for instance, in COVID-19. A lot of people consume more news, but at the same time, the news was mostly negative. And so, lots of people turned away from the news because it was too negative. And in general, that’s something people who start avoiding the news or who avoid the news mentioned. That’s one of the main things.

A lot of people also feel just overwhelmed by the amount of news that there is and they think there is too much they cannot follow everything. That’s also the reason… I forgot the other reasons I think they are slightly less important.

I think negativity in the news is one, but at the same time, we know that negative news is also more interesting. So you know, it’s also there are some positive news outlets, but the positive news outlets are not very successful. And I think it shows that people are actually not very interested in positive news. They they say they want it, but I mean a lot of people say they want stuff, but then when you give it to them, they they don’t like it.

And of course, we are interested in the trains that are late and not the trains that are on time so it’s difficult. There’s no easy solution I think to remedy this problem.

But I do think that maybe the news sometimes covers negative events too much and doesn’t give the broad picture enough, like even about stuff like poverty, hunger around the world. Most people think that, yeah, poverty is increasing, that hunger is increasing and that’s totally false, like extreme poverty has been reducing a lot in in the last 50 years. Same for hunger and many of the of the world’s problems are actually getting better.

Many people don’t know that, and I think maybe the news just needs to also give the big picture a little bit more. But again, I don’t know, it’s complex.

00:37:00 Domen Savič / Citizen D

And wrapping up. Are there some, let’s say low hanging fruits in this fight against disinformation about media perception, about reality perception that that you are, let’s say, paying attention to when you’re looking at it?

Are there some things that should be happening or will happen that will make you say OK we did something right or this is something that that was worth pursuing or that is worth pursuing if we want to wake up one day in, to put it very stereotypically, in a brave new world – in a positive way?

00:37:49 Sacha Altay

I’m not sure, but to be honest, some example I see are like really Hugo decrypt in France, this French influencer I think is doing a lot of good to interest people in the news that are usually not interested, and I see a lot of value in that, probably more than fact checking.

I’d say that just the work of Hugo decrypt reduces misperceptions in French more than all fact checking in France just because a lot of people who would not have consumed news now consume news because of him and are aware of a lot of stuff and get some context on events, etcetera.

And so, I think this is going in the right direction and it makes me optimistic. I also very much trust the European Union to do some work to hold big tech accountable. Of course, I don’t think big Tech is the cause of all our problem, but I do think that we need to hold them accountable. And they are so powerful that at the country level in Europe, we cannot do much against them.

But united with Europe, I think we can increase, for instance, the sharing the data or there are a lot of stuff that we can push these big companies to do, that would help us better understand the ecosystem.

Because one thing I haven’t said is that we don’t know much about the descriptively about the disinformation ecosystem in general in most countries, we know a lot about the US and some Western democracies, but because we don’t have good access to data, we don’t know much and a lot of people are jumping to conclusions proposing solutions, et cetera, but might take has mostly been guys we don’t know much yet and in most countries that matters and even countries like India, we don’t know much about the new ecosystem.

We don’t know much about what’s going on with the WhatsApp group and in these countries and now we are proposing solutions based on, I think, a biased understanding of information, ecosystems and so, I believe the European Union could help us have a better overview of information ecosystems, but I think, yeah, that’s mostly what makes me hopeful.

But when I’ve seen discourse and news coverage during the European elections, I’ve not seen much misinformation. I’ve not seen much AI generated misinformation. So, I think it’s pretty good news and it was the same in many other countries, even like India or many countries like there.

There was of course some false information as usual but there was no massive information operation that worked and influenced people. So, it also makes me pretty hopeful that, at least for now, I think things are going fine. Of course, we need to make it better, but it’s not like here.

00:40:45 Domen Savič / Citizen D

Excellent. We’ll end up on a on a positive note. Thank you Sasha for dropping by, for sharing your thoughts on the issue. We are off the next month, so see you all again in September. And yes, thank you again Sasha for for dropping by.

00:41:02 Sacha Altay

Thank you very much for having me.

Citizen D advice:

  • Instead of information on disinformation, breed trust in the legacy media
  • Focus on social issues that are the basis for effective disinformation
  • Reform the media industry to adapt to new way of communicating the news

More information:

  • Misunderstanding the harms of online misinformation – article
  • Misinformation on Misinformation: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges – article
  • News Can Help! The Impact of News Media and Digital Platforms on Awareness of and Belief in Misinformation – article
  • Not Born Yesterday – book

About the podcast:

Podcast Citizen D gives you a reason for being a productive citizen. Citizen D features talks by experts in different fields focusing on the pressing topics in the field of information society and media. We can do it. Full steam ahead!

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