Longer answers to some questions I was asked by some college students recently

Or, an essay about misinformation and labor.

“The School of Athens” by Raphael. Literally nobody has ever used this as a lead asset before and I am nothing if not original.

I spoke to a group of college students recently about media entrepreneurship, and two questions I was asked have stuck with me. The first was: What can we do to stop the spread of misinformation? The second was: What is the most under-reported story in the media today? I think I’ve continued to think about them because they really weren’t about media entrepreneurship or the publishing industry. They were questions that I don’t think have easy answers, and so I wanted to revisit them here.

What can we do to stop the spread of misinformation?

One of the lessons from college that stuck with me the most comes from a class I attended the least. On the first day of an Intro to Microeconomics course, the professor explained that while many people believe economics is about money, it’s actually about choices and incentives. We have limited time and limited resources, so we must be economical with our decisions. The decisions we make often stem from the incentives associated with them. 

This professor put all of his class notes online and then the class was mostly him reading the notes. After the second day of class, I stopped going and only showed up for exams. I think I got a B+ or an A-, but it didn’t really matter to me. What mattered at that point in my life was spending as much time at the school newspaper as humanly possible to learn the craft of journalism. In my estimation, there was little incentive to go to class four times a week and listen to someone read out loud what was available online. If the structure of the course was different, or if my goals in life at the time were different, I might have acted differently.

I think about this class all the time. It may sound completely ridiculous to you, dear reader, that A. I had never really approached life this way or that B. I now approach life this way. But we all make decisions based on incentives or perceived incentives, even if we don’t stop to consciously weigh them. 

Which brings me to misinformation and the ways in which to combat it. When the question was posed, my instinct was to share what an individual can do to prevent misinformation. Things like not sharing unverified information on social media. I then drifted into things I generally don’t think work as well as many people wish they would, such as the myriad fact checking enterprises that have sprouted up over the last decade or so. While I think efforts to inoculate individuals from misinformation are important, what I find far more interesting and critical is analyzing the incentives that both enable misinformation and give it so much power. Misinformation is difficult to stamp out once it exists, 

The subject of misinformation is contentious to say the least. When wading into a subject that means different things to different people, it’s best to explicitly state what you mean. When I say misinformation, I mean: the deliberate creation, dissemination, and amplification of falsehoods. My definition is lackluster from a punitive standpoint. It would require the ability to read someone’s mind and know without a doubt if someone was deliberately creating fake facts. But that’s not my goal. What matters to me is changing their motivation to act in bad faith. Incentives shape behavior, and misinformation has many incentives. I think the key is really to identify why misinformation is created and promoted in the first place, and prevent that not through coercion but by changing incentive structures. 

First of all, there’s no easy answer to this. If there was, it wouldn’t be an issue that causes so much consternation. Second, I don’t think this is a problem journalists alone can solve. It’s a matter of societal organization and structure. It’s been well-documented that creating misinformation is a lucrative business. As long as there are ways to monetize misinformation, someone is going to find a way to capitalize on it. The advent of programmatic advertising means that virtually anyone on Earth can whip up a website and start monetizing traffic. Social media companies—who also drive revenue through ads—require users to stay on their sites so they can show them ads. This means it’s fairly easy to distribute misinformation—especially when the incentives of the social media companies and the creators of misinformation are aligned. As misinformation is often deliberately crafted to anger people, and humans tend to react more vociferously with something that angers them, misinformation is a fabulous tool for keeping people engaged on your site, as evidenced by Facebook’s algorithm assigning additional value to angry reactions. 

I get to this point and I pause, and I think about the dual sets of misinformation incentives: The financial incentives and the psychological incentives. They are inseparable. It will be impossible to fix misinformation without significantly changing societal incentives. We’re not going to change human psychology, which research suggests leaves us susceptible to misinformation when intentionally crafted to play on various cognitive biases and processes. People will continue to take action more if they are afraid or angry. As I’ve written before, this is all very in line with human drive systems. Our fight-or-flight systems tend to overrule our tend-and-befriend systems. This seems to have been beneficial for evolution, but not so beneficial for information dissemination in 2022.

So what to do? How do you remove the financial incentive to create misinformation? How do you remove the psychological allure of misinformation? I don’t know, to be honest. I think those are the questions we should be asking. I think regulating large tech companies is good, but vague (others like Matt Stoller, who writes about America’s monopoly crisis, can speak to that nuance better than I can). I think campaign finance reform, which would add more transparency to various dark money groups that fund misinformation, would also be helpful. I think a media largely controlled by corporations and billionaires that exists to make a profit—despite the many honest and hardworking journalists they may employ—doesn’t help either. I find the Biden administration’s “Disinformation Governance Board” a chilling notion. But I also think it’s a fantasy that there is some perfectly functioning marketplace of ideas and the “best” ideas necessarily win. That’s an oversimplification of how the human mind processes and makes sense of the world. It’s also an oversimplification about how ideas are promoted and given weight in today’s algorithmic world populated by moneyed interests.

There’s really no dancing around it. As long as society is organized around profit and private capital, with ever wealthier and more powerful interests, misinformation will have a home. Misinformation is systemic. It can’t be separated from the many manifestations of socioeconomic inequality that our country produces. 

What is the most under-reported story in the media today?

When asked about this by a student, I said labor was the most under-reported story. Labor isn’t as tendentious as misinformation, but it is certainly a sprawling subject with many aspects. Fundamentally though, labor is about the relationship between the people who own companies and the people work for those companies. I have an unusual perspective on this in that I am staunchly pro-union, yet cannot join the union at the company I work for because I am management. I also have no ownership in the company, so I exist in an in-between state.

In 2020, I published an essay at said employer, TPM, where I wrote about the ills of private government:

“America is a place where corporations and shareholders have immense power and workers do not. This is partly because of an erosion of social insurance programs. It’s also because unions, the primary tool by which employees can have some say over how their workplace functions, have been under assault for decades. Unionization peaked in 1954 at 28.3 percent percent of the workforce. Now, only 10.3 percent of all workers and only 6.2 percent of private workers are in a union. Unions have traditionally been the most effective way for workers to effect change in their workplace.

“One result of this increase in corporate power is an increase in the share of profits going to those who own corporations. Over the last few decades, profits have shifted away from workers and toward shareholders.”

The essay was in large part inspired by American philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, who has written at length on the role work plays in our life. She unwittingly aided my argument today by adding “(And Why We Don’t Talk About It)” to the title of a book she wrote in 2019. Again, citing my essay at TPM:

“In Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It), Elizabeth Anderson discusses at length how the free market, as imagined by 18th and 19th century thinkers such as Adam Smith and Thomas Paine, was supposed to be a ‘leveling’ force that gave more liberty to individuals. They imagined a society comprised mostly of people who worked for themselves, or companies that were quite small. Smith’s famous pin factory in which he explained his theory of division of labor had 10 people and it was thought to be large. The massive corporations of today and the power they exert do not reflect that vision. But, as Andersen explains:

‘We do not live in the market society imagined by Paine and Lincoln, which offered an appealing vision of what a free society of equals would look like, combining individualistic libertarian and egalitarian ideals. Government is everywhere, not just in the form of the state but even more pervasively in the workplace. Yet public discourse and much of political theory pretends this is not so.’

“In our quest to eschew one form of tyranny, Anderson explains, we have created another.

“Tyranny is a strong word. But it’s difficult to conjure a more accurate term for a system in which you have to show up somewhere suspecting you may then become gravely ill, or face punishment. While many on the right may eschew the state, they certainly don’t mind powerful governments forcing you to do things you don’t want.”

The issue of misinformation and labor go together. Again, systemic. People in this country are scared. People are always scared. They are scared rights are going to be taken away. They are scared they could get hurt, face astronomical medical bills and lose everything. They watch cable news and are told half the country wants to replace them. They are afraid they will be disenfranchised while others are afraid voting machines are being manipulated.

It’s all about decisions and incentives.