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ABSTRACT
If citizens are to make enlightened collective decisions, they need to rely on true factual beliefs, but misinformation impairs their ability to do so. Although some cases of misinformation are deliberate and amount to propaganda, cases of inadvertent misinformation are just as problematic in affecting the beliefs and behavior of democratic citizens. A review of empirical evidence suggests that this is a serious issue that cannot entirely be addressed by means of deliberation.
Notes
1 It is worth noting that my argument does not in any way rely on the claim that ideal political theorizing is not a worthwhile philosophical project.
2 One way to accommodate the distinction between deliberate and accidental cases of misinformation would be to distinguish between “disinformation” (intentional cases) and “misinformation” (accidental cases), as is sometimes done in communication studies. I have no objection to this terminology, but I do not find it intuitive and I struggle to see what advantage it has over continuing to use qualifiers.
3 Technically speaking, misinformation can happen on a small scale. For instance, I may misinform my wife regarding the hour at which our friend’s dinner party will start. In the rest of the discussion, however, my focus is on cases of misinformation directed at a large audience.
4 Some scholars interested in the study of propaganda may resist my categorization of cognitive propaganda as a subset of misinformation by pointing out that, in some instances of propaganda, propagandists aim to shape people's beliefs without exposing them to faulty or misleading information. Such scholars will be inclined to conceive of the relationship between misinformation and cognitive propaganda as the one that exists between two circles of a Venn diagram rather than—as I propose to do—as two concentric circles. Either way, however, political epistemologists should attend to all cases of misinformation, not solely those that can also be considered cases of cognitive propaganda.
5 It may be possible to explain the widespread belief that Hussein was working with al-Qaeda by the public’s unfamiliarity with Middle Eastern politics, but it is likely that Americans who believed that WMD had been found in Iraq were influenced by the Bush administration’s claims. As Kull, Lewis and Ramsay note, “people do not form misperceptions in a vacuum” (Citation2003, 570).
6 One methodological concern over studies that associate conservative media use and belief in anthropogenic global warming is that we have evidence that people seek out sources that confirm their opinions (selective exposure). Prima facie, it is therefore possible that lack of belief in global warming could have caused people to use conservative media, not vice versa. But one reason to think that the media have a substantial impact on belief is that modifying the media content to which a group of randomly selected individuals is exposed also modifies their beliefs (on this general phenomenon see Althaus Citation2003). For example, when Corbett and Durfee (Citation2004) exposed a group of subjects to different versions of a story about a scientific study reporting that the Antarctic Ice Sheet is melting, they found that subjects exposed to the story to which controversy was deliberately added reported a lower level of certainty in global warming than subjects placed in the control condition. This suggests that by repeatedly insisting on the so-called lack of consensus on anthropogenic climate change in the scientific community, conservative broadcasters do foster doubts.
7 Is it not possible to conceive of cases in which individuals sincerely believe even the most far-fetched claims to be true, and then choose to present them as news in an attempt to inform the public? It is not impossible, and it is important to acknowledge that intentions are notoriously difficult to track. But when a fake news article can be traced back to an organization that repeatedly diffuses unsubstantiated claims and that has a commercial or political interest in doing so—think for instance of the Russia-based Internet Research Agency—a reasonable conclusion to draw is that such an organization is knowingly deceiving the public. I thank Jeffrey Friedman for pressing me on this point, and more generally for inciting me to draw the distinction between intentional and unintentional cases of misinformation.
8 This estimate is conservative because the study only tracked 156 fake news stories (Allcott and Gentzkow Citation2017). It also did not measure exposure to misinformation on mobile devices or cases in which individuals were exposed to misinformation on their newsfeed without visiting the fake news website (i.e. without clicking on the link).
9 The man behind the Denver Guardian publicly admitted that he created and diffused fake news articles both for profit and for his own amusement (Sydell Citation2016).
10 For a review, see Dechêne, Stahl, Hansen, and Wänke Citation2010.
11 Note, however, that this fifth finding supports the narrower claim that sensationalistic misinformation (rather than misinformation as such) is effective.
12 Primary bads include “war, famine, economic collapse, political collapse, epidemic, and genocide” (Estlund Citation2008, 163). Epistemic democrats thus make the moral assumption that some outcomes can be deemed good or bad according to a normative criterion that is independent from the collective will of the people. I share this assumption. For instance, we can say that genocide is bad even if a large majority of voters support it.
13 Although my argument is an exercise in non-ideal theorizing about democracy, it is worth noting that the central idealizing assumptions made by epistemic democrats may not immunize their theories against the problem posed by misinformation. For instance, Landemore (Citation2013, 11 and 197) assumes that citizens and rulers are motivated by a concern for the public good and actively seek to promote what they conceive of as the interests of “the entire community, as opposed to the interests of the rulers themselves or a subgroup within society.” A second idealizing assumption central to her theory is that democratic deliberation has epistemic merits only when individuals “properly deliberate,” that is, when all deliberating parties engage in “genuine consideration of arguments for and against something” (ibid., 138). This may seem to preclude people from misinforming each other—but only if those who engage in misinformation are motivated by a concern for the interests of a subgroup within society. When pundits deliberately lie on social media during electoral campaigns, they may be motivated by the consequentialist reasoning that this will ultimately serve the common good: it may help the political party they consider to be truly promoting their country’s interest. As for the assumption that deliberation yields epistemic benefits only when people properly deliberate, it certainly precludes deliberative processes during which individuals misinform each other. Yet misinformation not only affects cognition during deliberation, but also before individuals begin to deliberate. Indeed, a deliberative assembly may be composed of well-intentioned individuals who properly deliberate, but who have been misinformed in the past. When this is the case, they risk making political decisions based on false beliefs and misinforming others unwittingly.
14 Other studies suggesting that holding false beliefs influences political and voting preferences include Hochschild and Einstein 2014 and Reedy et. al. Citation2014. As is often the case when considering empirical evidence, it remains difficult to draw definitive conclusions from such studies. For this reason, my suggestion in this section and the previous one is not that we should draw such conclusions, but, more moderately, that findings in social and political psychology give us reasons to believe that misinformation will be an obstacle to the translation of the ideal theory of democracy to the real world. At the very least, it is a problem that should be discussed by epistemic democrats interested in non-ideal theory.
15 Of course, political judgments may be overdetermined. For instance, someone might support greater immigration because (a) she believes that migrants have a positive impact on her country and (b) she believes that migrants have a moral right to emigrate to her country. In this case, coming to falsely believe that migrants committed crimes that were in fact fabricated will not modify her overall judgment on immigration if she considers the reasons that stem from (b) as overriding. But false beliefs may also give rise to (internal) reasons that are sufficiently strong as to modify an individual’s overall judgment. As we have seen, Kull, Ramsay, and Lewis’s study suggests that the false belief that WMD had been found in Iraq boosted support for the war. A study by Richard Gunther, Paul Beck, and Erik Nisbet (2018), still in its initial stages, appears to suggest that Obama voters who held false negative beliefs about Hillary Clinton were 3.9 times more likely to vote for Trump that those who did not. This is hardly surprising: falsely believing that a presidential candidate committed immoral actions provides one with strong reasons to vote for her opponent. I thank Emily Sullivan for drawing my attention to this point.
16 The pernicious effects of misinformation extend beyond the decision to vote for candidate x. Given the importance of surveys in the political process of Western democracies, the prevalence of widely held false beliefs may influence the very political options that are available to citizens. If surveys show that a large segment of the population has a negative view of migrants because of fake news that portrays them in an unflattering light, all political parties are likely to take a tougher stance on immigration to cater to a wide range of voters, at least in countries with majoritarian electoral systems. I owe this point to Zoe Phillips Williams.
17 In this paper, I limit myself to an assessment of the political consequences of misinformation. More precisely, my suggestion is that false beliefs lead to poorly justified political decisions, and that poorly justified political decisions risk producing bad outcomes. I share this assumption with political scientists concerned about the problem of political ignorance. That said, one could extend the analysis of misinformation by arguing that it is undesirable for individuals to hold false beliefs, regardless of the societal consequences. From an instrumental point of view, people need to construct a reliable picture of the world in order to effectively further their interests, such that misinformation about personal matters may be disastrous. From a perfectionist point of view, one could also argue that knowledge and truth are essential components of a good human life.
18 In fact, combining falsehoods with a kernel of truth to make the former appear more convincing is a propaganda technique that was widely used by misinformation officers during the Cold War.