6 March 2021 | New Scientist | 33Book
You Are Here
Whitney Phillips and
Ryan M. Milner
MIT Press
THIS is a book about pollution, not
of the physical environment, but
of our civic discourse. It concerns
disinformation (false, misleading
information deliberately spread),
misinformation (false, misleading
information inadvertently spread)
and malinformation (information
with a basis in reality spread
specifically to cause harm).
Communications experts Whitney
Phillips and Ryan Milner finished
their book just before the election
that replaced Donald Trump with
Joe Biden. That election and the
seditious activities that prompted
Trump’s second impeachment have
clarified many of the issues the
authors were at pains to explore.
You Are Here: A field guide for
navigating polarized speech,
conspiracy theories, and our
polluted media landscape is an
invaluable guide to our problems
around news, truth and fact.
The authors’ US-centric – but
globally applicable – account of
“fake news” begins with the rise
of the Ku Klux Klan. Its deliberately
silly name, cartoonish robes and
the routines that accompanied all its
activities, from rallies to lynchings,
prefigured the “only joking”
subcultures of Pepe the Frog and
the like that dominate social media.
Next, their examination of the
1980s Satanic panics reveals much
about conspiracy theories. They also
unpick QAnon, a far-right conspiracy
theory alleging that a secret cabal
of cannibalistic, Satan-worshipping
paedophiles plotted against Trump.
This pulls together their points in a
way that is more troubling for being
so closely argued.
Polluted information is, they
say, a public health emergency.
By treating the information sphere
as a threatened ecology, the authors
push past factionalism to reveal
how, when we use media, “the
everyday actions of everyone else
feed into and are reinforced by the
worst actions of the worst actors”.
This is their most striking
takeaway: the media landscape
that enabled QAnon isn’t a machine
out of alignment, or out of control,
or somehow infected, but “a system
that damages so much because it
works so well”.
It is founded on principles that
seem only laudable. Top of the list
is the idea that to counter harms,
we must call attention to them: “in
other words, that light disinfects”.
This is fine as long as light is hard
to generate. But what happens
when that light – the confluence
of competing information sets,
depicting competing realities –
becomes blinding?
Take Google. The authorscharacterise it as an advertising
platform that makes more money
the more people use it. The deeper
down the rabbit holes our searches
go, the more Google and others
earn, incentivising promulgators
of conspiracy theories to produce
content, creating “alternative media
echo-systems”. When facts run out,
create more. Media algorithms don’t
care: they are designed to serve up
as much as possible of what Phillips
and Milner call pollution.
The authors bemoan the way
memes, rumours and conspiracy
theories have swallowed political
discourse. They teeter on the
edge of a more important truth:
that our moral discourse has been
swallowed too. You Are Here comes
dangerously close to saying that
social media has made whining
cowards of us all.
So what is to be done? The
authors’ call for “foundational,
systematic, top-to-bottom change”
is mere floundering. It has taken the
environmental movement decades
to work out mechanisms to address
the climate emergency. Nothing in
You Are Here suggests the media
emergency will be less intractable. ❚The symbol of the
QAnon far-right
conspiracy theoryPA
CIFIC^ PRE
SS
/LI
GHTR
OCKE
T^ VIA^ GET
TY
IMAGESPolluted discourse
Fake news and conspiracy theories create a kind of pollution –
and we should treat it as such, finds Simon Ings
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