CAM 19 – READING Test 1 Passage 3

1. Misinformation – both deliberately promoted and accidentally shared – is perhaps an inevitable part of the world in which we live, but it is not a new problem. People likely have lied to one another for roughly as long as verbal communication has existed. Deceiving others can offer an apparent opportunity to gain strategic advantage, to motivate others to action, or even to protect interpersonal bonds. Moreover, people inadvertently have been sharing inaccurate information with one another for thousands of years.

2. However, we currently live in an era in which technology enables information to reach large audiences distributed across the globe, and thus the potential for immediate and widespread effects from misinformation now looms larger than in the past. Yet the means to correct misinformation might, over time, be found in those same patterns of mass communication and of the facilitated spread of information.

3. The main worry regarding misinformation is its potential to unduly influence attitudes and behavior, leading people to think and act differently than they would if they were correctly informed. We worry that misinformation might lead people to hold misperceptions (or false beliefs) and that these misperceptions, especially when they occur among large groups of people, may have detrimental, downstream consequences for health, social harmony, and the political climate.

4. At least three observations warrant attention. First of all, people who encounter misinformation tend to believe it, at least initially. Secondly, electronic and print media often do not block many types of misinformation before it appears. Thirdly, countering misinformation once it has enjoyed wide exposure can be a resource-intensive effort.

5. The question of exactly how – and when – we mentally label information as true or false has garnered philosophical debate. Descartes argued that a person only accepts or rejects information after considering its truth; Spinoza argued that people accept all encountered information by default and then subsequently verify or reject it through a separate cognitive process. Recent evidence supports Spinoza’s account: people appear to encode all new information as if it were true, even if only momentarily, and later tag the information as true or false.

6. Organizations such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tend to focus on post hoc detection of broadcast information. The FDA oversees drug advertising and has developed programs such as the ‘Bad Ad’ program, through which people can report advertising in apparent violation of guidelines. However, such programs do not keep false advertising off the airwaves entirely.

7. This leads us to our third observation: a campaign to correct misinformation requires resources and planning. Audiences need to be able to comprehend these campaigns. Some audiences might be unaware of the potential for misinformation, suggesting the utility of media literacy efforts as early as elementary school.

8. To overcome the worst effects of the phenomenon, we will need coordinated efforts over time, rather than any singular one-time panacea. Misinformation arises as a result of human fallibility and human information needs.