though, proposed solutions to harmful information are often one-
dimensional, with suggestions that we need to do more of something
or less of something.
As with any complex social question, there’s unlikely to be a
simple, definitive answer. ‘I think the shift we’re going through is akin
to what happened in the United States on the war on drugs,’ said
Brendan Nyhan.[124] ‘We’re moving from “this is a problem that we
have to solve” to “this is a chronic condition we have to manage”. The
psychological vulnerabilities that make humans prone to
misperceptions aren’t going to go away. The online tools that help it
circulate aren’t going to go away.’
What we can do, though, is try and make media outlets, political
organisations, and social media platforms – not to mention ourselves
- more resistant to manipulation. To start with, that means having a
much better understanding of the transmission process. It’s not
enough to concentrate on a few groups, or countries, or platforms.
Like disease outbreaks, information rarely respects boundaries. Just
as the 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ was blamed on Spain because it was the
only country reporting cases, our picture of online contagion can be
skewed by where we see outbreaks. In recent years, researchers
have published almost five times more studies looking at contagion
on Twitter than on Facebook, despite the latter having seven times
more users.[125] This is because, historically, it’s been much easier
for researchers to access public Twitter data than to see what’s
spreading on closed apps like Facebook or WhatsApp.
There’s hope the situation could change – in 2019, Facebook
announced it was partnering with twelve teams of academics to study
the platform’s effect on democracy – but we still have a long way to
go to understand the wider information ecosystem.[126] One of the
reasons online contagion is so hard to investigate is that it’s been
difficult for most of us to see what other people are actually exposed
to. A couple of decades ago, if we wanted to see what campaigns
were out there, we could pick up a newspaper or turn on our
televisions. The messages themselves were visible, even if their
impact was unclear. In outbreak terms, everyone could see the
sources of infection, but nobody really understood how much