Archive for June 26th, 2008

Two days ago I was with a friend who enjoys watching Fox News. Where I get angry at the inanity and ignorance of the programming, he laughs at the foolish topics discussed. To me, the cycle of misinformation is dangerous and needs to be addressed. Whatever the cause, insidious or innocent, this election has been marred by numerous rumours, particularly concerning Barack Obama.

As these memes gain traction online, sensationalist television news gives both creedence and additional adherents to the rumors. In turn, the speculation survives. To cloud important political decisions with innuedo, rumor and outright lies is dangerous and needs to be fought.

What, then, are the solutions? Barack Obama’s campaign thinks the answer consists of presenting verifiable truth. Their site, Fight the Smears, disproves many of the more popular myths including Obama’s “secret Muslim childhood.” It also allows supporters to email their contacts with the truth and claims to identify three political operatives who are to blame. In effect, it is a social Snopes for the campaign.

This is imperfect at best. My gut tells me that those who believe the emails they receive about Obama’s lack of patriotism will not use or trust Obama’s site. Perhaps third-party sites like Snopes could serve to convince others of their impartial truths, but it still lacks the saliency of political smears which are more likely to be forwarded than the bland truths. A real solution would have to slightly raise the cost of forwarding misinformation and lower the cost of checking the truth. Fight the Smears serves to lower the cost of fact-checking. A Firefox plugin which contextually searched for misinformation on a page could do similarly. How could we raise the costs of spreading disinformation? Some sort of karma system could rank sites but would it be biased or gamed?

What do you think would be the best way to fight disinformation?

Update: Louis Gray has noticed a similar trend populating Twitter. Some insightful thoughts in the post and comments.