Considering Interinstitutional Visibilities in Combating Misinformation

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue “Fighting Fakes: News publishers, fact-checkers, platform companies, and policymaking” argues that the institutionalization of interactions related to misinformation is central to scholarly understandings of the visibility and structural inequalities of institutionalized efforts to fighting fakes. We look at the ways that contributors of this special issue have shown how materialities, institutions, practices, politics, economics, and culture shape the field of fighting fakes.

Keywords:

• Fact-checking
• platforms
• audiences
• news publishers
• policy-making
• misinformation
• fake news
• power

Introduction

The problem of misinformation and its social consequences has emerged as an increasingly prominent global issue, drawing extraordinary attention in academic and policy circles, as well as from journalists and politicians in many countries. In communication-related disciplines, research on mis- and disinformation is beginning to cohere as a distinct subspeciality, sometimes called “disinformation studies” (Kuo and Marwick 2021), engaging scholars in areas as disparate as political communication, health communication, (digital) journalism studies, internet studies, media history, and critical cultural studies. Dozens of recent monographs, special issues, and edited volumes focus on the issue, as does a dedicated journal launched in 2020. But academic activity is only one aspect of a wider issue that extends from the United Nations and the European Commision to national regulatory bodies, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, and fact-checking outlets at the transnational, national or local level in every region of the world.

This is the intellectual landscape that we call fighting fakes. In this special issue of Digital Journalism, focusing on institutions (cf. Reese 2021), we seek to gain a deeper understanding of how journalists, news publishers, platform companies, fact-checking organizations, and governments approach with misinformation. We argue that the milieu in which these institutionalized interactions take place is central to understanding the visibility and structural inequalities of institutionalized efforts to fighting fakes.

Ultimately, the institutionalization of fighting fakes has implications for who gets to decide what misinformation is, how misinformation is tackled, and to what extent fighting fakes is measurable and whether institutional interventions are effective. The authors of this special issue studies represent a breadth of research embedded in rigorous empirical and conceptual work. Such work reflects the diversity of the field of (digital) journalism studies, although we are aware that a special issue alone cannot be exhaustive and that it is part of a larger effort for the journal to foster a diverse and inclusive environment. In this special issue, we have also invited scholars including Anna Gladkova and Svetlana Bodrunova to discuss the role of computation in disinformation research. Divina Frau-Meigs also discussed how disinformation has been reshaping the relationship between journalism and media and information literacy (MIL). These comments provide further context to the special issue and its articles. They also push the discussions in the arenas of computational journalism and policymaking.

Context of Institutions and Misinformation

Recent years have seen mounting concern about the political and social consequences of misinformation, including online rumors, political propaganda, and media manipulation. Misinformation refers to false, inaccurate, or misleading information, whether unintentional or produced and distributed for political and financial gain. The latter category is often described as disinformation or “fake news” (Ireton and Posetti 2018; Kalsnes 2018; Tandoc, Lim, and Ling 2018), a label used by political actors to delegitimize the news media intentionally or unintentionally (Egelhofer and Lecheler 2019; Carlson, Robinson, and Lewis 2021). While misinformation is hardly a new problem, it spreads in new ways and with potentially different effects in a digital media environment where professional news organizations have ceded much of their gatekeeping authority to search engines, social media networks, and other algorithmic mediators (Entman and Usher 2018).

Observers point to a range of ways in which misinformation may be destructive to the fabric of political society (Kalsnes 2018). While research suggests that initial fears about the electoral influence of “fake news” have been exaggerated (Guess et al. 2020), we need to understand further the role of different forms of misinformation in eroding public trust in the media, politicial, expert, and public institutions. Observers also point to the degradation of the quality of political debate, integrity of electoral processes, and intensified political and ideological polarization (Neudert 2019). Research also shows that misinformation continues to shape individual and collective attitudes, even after it has been debunked (Southwell, Thorson, and Sheble 2018), that corrections have a positive but limited effect in dispelling false beliefs tied to our political and social identities (Lewandowsky et al. 2012), and that even successful factual corrections may not alter political or policy preferences (Porter, Wood, and Bahador 2019; Nyhan et al. 2020). In the midst of all this, it is important to further investigate how news publishers, fact-checkers, platform companies, and policymaking contribute to efforts to fight against misinformation.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the viral spread of misinformation has accentuated these concerns. COVID-19 has also sparked a convergence of misinformation relating to both health communication and political communication that is deeply worrying and challenging (Napoli 2011). The World Health Organization (WHO) has described this global pandemic as an overabundance of information, some accurate and some not, that makes it difficult for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance. Also, recent international research into the pandemic, such as a special issue in Digital Journalism (Quandt and Wahl-Jorgensen 2021), reports on issues such as sourcing (Mellado et al. 2021), news consumption and news avoidance (Van Aelst et al. 2021; de Bruin et al. 2021), and potential state influence (Wu 2021; Papadopoulou and Maniou 2021). During such a crisis, the need to distinguish fact-based information from rumors and conspiracy theories can be a question of life and death (Kreps and Nyhan 2020). Some platform companies have increased their efforts to identify, curate, use flags, or remove misinformation related to the virus.

The role of platform companies in mediating information flows raises a host of questions about how to identify and classify harmful misinformation, how to monitor its sources and circulation, and how to assign responsibility for it (Helberger 2020). In recent years, the news industry, fact-checking organizations, and civil society have also increasingly acted to fight against misinformation generally, with new practices such as fact-checking. Journalism as an institution aspires to produce truthful news with verified information from trusted sources. Fact-checking organizations continuously work towards identifying, debunking, and reducing the visibility of misinformation. In doing so, they have emphasized national and international collaborations designed to fight misinformation, sometimes also in collaboration with governments and platforms companies (Graves 2016).

Institutional Arrangements in Fighting Fakes

The range of actors and initiatives involved in fighting fakes, in national contexts and globally, underscores the value of adopting an institutionalist perspective in studying this landscape. Scholars have increasingly applied this lens to fact-checking organizations, using field-theoretic or institutionalist frameworks to explain organizational diversity within the fact-checking field, as well as to track its development over time (Lowrey 2017; Graves and Lauer 2020; Graves 2018). Fact-checking outlets also have an explicit institution-building mission—or are projects of organizations with such a mission—tied to reforming or strengthening democratic institutions including the press, a finding replicated in studies of fact-checkers operating on multiple continents and in diverse political contexts (Cheruiyot and Ferrer-Conill 2018; Amazeen 2020; Galarza-Molina 2020; Riera and Zommer 2020). And fact-checkers are increasingly recognized by other public and civil society actors as an established profession defined by a common set of values, standards, and practices. What Reese argues about journalism broadly applies to fact-checking in particular: it becomes an institution to the extent other institutions treat it as such (Reese 2020).

However, close attention to the meso-level of institutional logics and relationships also helps to bring to light the wider complex of interlinked global anti-misinformation efforts, which includes not just fact-checkers and news organizations but also technology companies, government agencies, transnational institutions, non-governmental organizations, academic institutions, and charitable foundations, among others. While this wider milieu comprises very distinct professional and occupational spheres, the diverse actors engaged in it share an increasingly well-funded and well-defined jurisdiction—misinformation—which has become a stable feature of the issue landscape. Making visible these institutional contexts is vital to developing a nuanced, historically grounded understanding of misinformation as a problem—to realistically assessing its sources and causes, its potential harms, and the measures that might mitigate them. Any serious effort to investigate and address the affordances of different media platforms for misinformation (Molina and Sundar 2019), like other efforts to promote algorithmic transparency and governance (Kitchin 2017; Introna 2016), show a need for the development of new institutional relationships and accountability mechanisms.

A focus on institutions centers the difficult question of how to understand the links between misinformation and the broader phenomenon of "democratic recession" or "illiberal democracy" that observers have diagnosed in the turn toward populist, authoritarian politics around the world (e.g., Zakaria 2016; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Diamond 2015). The best current research offers reason to doubt strong claims regarding the individual political effects of exposure to "fake news" (Guess et al. 2020; Tucker et al. 2018). At the same time, a complex dynamic exists in which conspiracy theories and other forms of misinformation align with patterns of declining institutional trust and eroding civic norms among elite political actors as well as the wider public—what Waisbord (2018) calls the “elective affinity between post-truth communication and populist populist politics” (see also Lance Bennett and Livingston 2020; Kreiss 2016; Tumber and Waisbord 2021; Nechushtai 2018). Similarly, institutions such as public service media and media regulatory regimes come to the fore when we ask what structural factors or conditions promote "resilience" to mis- and disinformation in a given society (Benkler, Faris, and Roberts 2018; Humprecht et al. 2021).

In This Issue

The studies in this special issue provide important insights into the study of fighting fakes. Together these articles point to the importance of contextualizing different interinstitutional arrangements and practices, from socio-political contexts, media systems, institutional arrangements, digital materialities, and culture. As Tully et al. (2021) wrote, “research has coalesced around the idea that no single approach will work in all contexts, and effective strategies need to include media literacy, fact-checking, changes in how news is produced and circulated, government oversight, and regulations as well as responses that take local contexts into account.” Rather, it will take a “multipronged approach” that considers actors, technological actants, activities, and audiences (Lewis and Westlund 2015) as well as the diversity of meanings that terms such as misinformation or fake news have for people (Tully et al. 2021).

In their research, Tully et. al. (2021) uses data from 36 focus groups in six sub-Saharan African countries to examine the perception of whether misinformation is a problem and the perceived responsibility for addressing misinformation and solutions to the problems. The study finds that people share the responsibility of fighting against misinformation. The consequences range from damaged reputation to political or electoral violence. Among other things, while participants claimed that individual actions like media literacy are important, they were not that familiar to what it would mean in practice. The authors note differences in rural contexts where people may not use social networking sites as much as their chief source of information. The context thus matters greatly in understanding misinformation.

Similarly, Cushion et al. (2021) as well as Ferracioli, Butture Kniess, and Jamil Marques (2022) point to the relevance of national media systems and political culture in audience expectations of fact-checking and engagement with news. With a focus on the United Kingdom’s media system, Cushion et al. (2021) point out that their study’s respondents who were attentive to the media wanted journalists to verify facts and question misleading comments rather than push for speed and speculation. For them, the intervention is straightforward: for broadcasters to include fact-checking prominently in their reportage and for them to increase “scrutiny of policy decisions without undermining audience trust in journalism” (p. 16). Using data from the Worlds of Journalism Survey on journalists' perception of their watchdog role, Ferracioli, Butture Kniess, and Jamil Marques (2022) suggest that each fact-checking organization dealt with the watchdog role differently. This proposes that not only, as other studies found, that watchdog role perceptions vary, but that they also vary across fact-checking organizations, and that is even if they may follow the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) code of principles. The authors thus suggest that fact-checking may be part of an interpretive turn in the news. Nissen et al. (2022) also develop a conceptual analysis perspective on fact-checking arguing that “infrastructures have inherent biases and argue that making visible such biases will increase transparency for stakeholders using it.”

Other contributors to this special issue expand the argument and propose that the role of institutions matters in terms of informing the behaviors of fact-checkers. For example, using a survey with more than 400 United States-based journalists, Saldaña and Vu (2021) “journalist-audience relationship plays a central role to understand debunking behaviors in online spaces.” While journalists care about fighting fakes, they report low levels of debunking false information. Factors, however, influence different types of debunking. For instance, social media polarized political environments, which may lead to audience mistrust in the news, may prevent journalists from exposing falsehood (see also Nagler et al. 2021). Journalists may also “ignore misinformation and hoaxes on social media to not give oxygen to such hoaxes” (Saldaña and Vu 2021). Conversely, Himma-Kadakas and Ojamets (2022) use in-depth interviews to explore the ways journalists use their professional skills and competencies to verify information while misinformation pervades. The scholars suggest that “time-pressure and excessive confidence in their experience with the official sources,” which may prevent journalists from performing fact-checking. Horowitz et al. (2021) also point to the particular context of public service media formed around values of universality, equality, diversity, accuracy, and quality. Although these organizations are formed on similar values, when fighting fakes, their activities vary significantly. Indeed, “each case country embodied different degrees of resilience against disinformation as well as the great extent to which the positions of the studied PSM organisations differed.”

Other scholars discuss the importance of direct content interventions while managing digital materialities. Opgenhaffen (2022) looks at how a Flemish fact-checking organization developed and deployed Tooties, cartoon characters, to inject fact-checks into the social media environment in a depolarizing way. The author argues that in this context direct fact-checking works especially in user’s social media timelines. The dynamic of social media platforms matter. Lien, Lee, and Tandoc (2021) explore and typologize the ways in which technology platforms, like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, construct and characterize online falsehoods. These manifest in the range of interventions they have implemented. While the “companies all recognized the rise of inauthentic behavior on their platforms, from fake accounts to fake content,” their focus was on “intention behind the creation and spread of a message, the format of the message, and the consequences of the message.” However, not all rainbows and butterflies, the authors also show that tech companies’ strategies have evolved in a way “to balance retaining control over their platforms and responding to public pressure.”

As in other articles addressing audiences (see also Cushion et al. 2021 for example), authors explored the ways in which audience engagement might muddy the picture. For instance, Kim et al. (2022) examined what message variations characterized news articles that reported fact-checking and the ways those messages shaped future audience engagement. Among other findings, Kim et al. (2022) showed that while particular forms of engagement such as “likes” or “angry” led to different outcomes, the scholar confirmed that contextual information in fact-checking was central in predicting audience engagement. As the authors point out, “providing richer contextual information helps the audience better understand the issues addressed by the articles and thereby facilitates active participation.” Kim et al. (2022) also note that experiential articles (vs. cognitive and analytical) may also lead to a higher level of absorption, thus making the audiences more perceptive to issues addressed by the articles, that is, assuming that “active participation” is a goal. Yet, Carson, et al. (2022) find, using an experiment on 1608 Australians, that “independent fact-checking decreases readers’ trust in the original news story and outlet.” This finding is not far-fetched as scholars have long shown that while corrections may be positive, they also may have limited effects on dispelling false beliefs, especially as tied to our political and social context. This finding resonates with these special issue articles highlighting the complexity of the issue and the importance of understanding the seminal role of institutions in fighting fakes.

Frau-Meigs also adds to this special issue by talking about the role of media literacy and digital source criticism in fighting fakes.

Conclusion

Together, in this special issue, the contributors have sensitized us to the importance of addressing context when researching misinformation: from digital materialities, institutions, practices, politics, economics, and culture shaping the field of fighting fakes. The milieu of institutionalized forms of fighting fakes have implications on who gets to decide what misinformation is, how misinformation is tackled, and to what extent fighting fakes is measurable and if the interventions are effective. Readers of this special issue would not be surprised to hear that the underlying assumption of these articles points to the importance of accountable and transparent institutions in engaging the public on truthful information or, at the very least, accurate information for people to make informed decisions about their lives. But while we value healthy institutions, this issue also invited criticism of the inner workings of such institutions in fighting fakes.

Together, these studies constitute a valiant attempt at unpacking the visible interinstitutional arrangements by deploying a variety of known methods and empirical settings that are needed to better understand fighting fakes. Acknowledging that there is no one-size-fits-all approach, the researchers in this special issue fear that interventions can be multiple and ineffective for the health of democracies (or the lure of it). They also shed light on platform-publisher-audience inequities and institutional interrelations, alluding to a lack of power of journalists and decline in trust. In other words, these scholars situate their research within the ways in which things that are made visible by the researcher such as materialities, institutions, practices, politics, economics, and culture shapes the field of fighting fakes. They also hint at recentering the academic and public discussion of fighting fakes towards power and asymmetries.

This criticism also translates into the limits of what we were able to address with this special issue. For example, we have a limited understanding on the role of public policy associated with misinformation. There is also a rising recognition that fighting fakes has its own share of harms on those involved in this struggle, from the happiness and well-being of social actors like journalists and fact-checkers who are being harmed or harassed, as in the case of Rappler’s CEO Maria Resa, to issues of audience participation and their own security or their inaction. Looking forward, it might be productive for researchers to further examine the social, psychological, and societal costs of fighting fakes.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The Research Council of Norway, KULMEDIA – Research Programme on the Culture and Media Sector, Project number 302303.