In September 2024, US vice presidential candidate JD Vance amplified a rumour circulating on Facebook that Haitian migrants in the small Ohio town of Springfield, where Vance is a senator, had been eating people’s pets. Erika Lee, who made the original post, later confirmed that she had no first-hand knowledge about any such incidents and was merely repeating something that a neighbour had told her – that a cat had gone missing and its owner had suspected that a Haitian had eaten it. Screenshots of Lee’s posts snowballed online, in part thanks to Vance, and the alarmist story was repeated by Donald Trump on the podium during the presidential election debate. No-one in Trump’s camp bothered to verify the alleged incidents, and by the time the Mayor of Springfield wrote an op-ed in the New York Times to debunk them, more than 30 bomb threats were called in to schools and businesses in the town and Haitian residents were left in fear for their lives.
This is just one recent example of how misinformation, particularly that which is generated online, can cause harm in the real world and influence the political process. In fact, this US election cycle has seen many such cases. By October the Trump campaign had accused his opponent Kamala Harris of ‘not being Black’ because of her mixed racial heritage, a claim that has been repeatedly weaponized to accuse her of cosplaying a Black identity for political point-scoring.
Online, websites affiliated to Trump have gone into overdrive making and then reifying false claims about the former president’s achievements while in office. Some of these claims are rebutted immediately and directly, much like the real-time fact-checking that is conducted during the presidential debates. But, as was the case of the non-existent Springfield cat eaters, sometimes fact-checking comes after a crisis has already taken shape.
Across the pond, a similar tale unfolded in July when online posts falsely alleged that a man who killed three children at a dance class in Southport, a small town in north England, was a Muslim asylum seeker. Over the following days racist riots engulfed communities across the country, and Mosques, racial minorities and asylum-seeker accommodations were targeted by mobs.
Sum of its parts
As a researcher on digital technologies, the concept of misinformation and disinformation (see Key Terms in Facts) presents a fascinating and equally challenging terrain of study. On one hand, it is very clear that the emergence of online platforms and their burgeoning political economy has increased the potency and complexity of the lies that usually surround political processes. On the other hand, to claim that misinformation is itself inherently new rings hollow, as propaganda has been central to politics throughout history – for example during the Cold War.
People lie, governments lie more, and the press has always been somewhere in the dance between these entities either as a participant, as a platform or as a moderating force between the camps
People lie, governments lie more, and the press has always danced between these entities either as a participant, as a platform or as a moderating force between camps. Misinformation that emerges in the digital age should be studied closely. But its perceived ‘newness’ is not the only reason why we must keep a close eye on this phenomenon. I argue repeatedly in my research that something else must be at play.
For me, this is the concept of the information ecosystem. We lose a great deal when we only focus on the platforms which enable misinformation to spread, or the consequences of this spreading in isolation. Rather, I argue that we should consider the role that information plays within a society as a system, not a sequence of isolated points or events.
Here, I find scientific metaphors helpful in illuminating this concept. Understanding an information ecosystem begins with understanding that societies are dynamic and made up of a series of elements that are connected through a substrate – similar to how atoms make up substances: each of these elements has a characteristic and brings to the system a set of qualities that shape the overall quality of the system. The ecosystem is both the sum of and greater than the sum of each of these elements. It has a unique characteristic that emerges from the way these various elements are stacked up against and relate to each other.
To continue with the chemistry metaphor: both water and hydrogen peroxide are made up of hydrogen and oxygen molecules. But where two hydrogen molecules bonded with one oxygen molecule gives us water – a substance integral to our survival – two hydrogen molecules bonded to two oxygen molecules gives us hydrogen peroxide, which is toxic to humans. The same two elements put together in a different arrangement creates a new outcome and relates differently to other materials.
Many audiences in the world have been primed to interact with news as entertainment rather than as information
The information ecosystem is where information about a society, or an event is generated and disseminated. The ecosystem comprises the news media and the outlets, but it is also the physical and online spaces in which information is shared, and the people who receive and interact with it. The packaging of news – as entertainment, for example – also shapes how audiences relate to it. If audiences are primed to treat political information as entertainment, they will respond differently than to purely informative news.
Useful lies
It is beyond the scope of this article to delve into media history, but concerns about propaganda and misinformation have always been integral to the news ecosystem. During the World War Two, both Axis and Allied powers had ministries of propaganda that were designed to frame the war as ultimately a greater good to the general public, to misrepresent the extent of battle losses, or to justify or obscure inhumane actions.
European colonial officers operating in the global majority during the last days of Empire spent significant parts of their budgets disseminating the idea that ‘natives’ were inherently inferior and did not deserve independence. The catalogue of misinformation spread against the Freedom and Land Army in Kenya, for instance, continues to the present day. They are still widely known as ‘Mau Mau’, a phonic that was spread by the colonial office to engender the idea that African freedom fighters were barbaric.
In her autobiography, Katherine Graham, the former publisher of the Washington Post, charts her family’s path towards consolidating the news-paper through purchasing many smaller outlets, some of which would be considered propaganda outlets by today’s standards. Pamphlets – as satirized by the television show Bridgerton – were a major part of the Regency and Victorian era information ecosystem. As long as people have needed to know things there has always been concern about people lying about things.
To help audiences discern the truth, many media practitioners, through their trade unions or labour organizations, developed independent standards for journalism. In some countries these standards are imposed from above through state bodies, like the Media Council of Kenya. But in other countries they depend entirely on self-regulation, as in the US where media practitioners are bound more by in-house editorial standards, whilst the law balances concerns about libel and defamation with defending the First Amendment right to free speech.
Commodification of news
To me, therefore, the real question that we contend with when we think about misinformation in the digital age is not whether or not it is new itself or requires new tools to address it. Instead the pressing question here is how the information ecosystem has been changed by digital platforms.
What does digital technology make possible that the analogue antecedents did not? Or, to put it another way, what is it that digital technologies and platforms add to the information ecosystem to increase the potency of misinformation?
For most people in the world, digital platforms have become the primary way that we get the news. The rise of Google and other free-to-use search engines meant that traditional outlets like newspapers, who were dependent on advertising revenue, rapidly lost their audiences and struggled to stay afloat amidst rising publishing costs. To use a quote from Current Affairs’s editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson, ‘all the news is paywalled and all the lies are free’ and so today people rely on whatever free content is available online far more than they do fact checked and edited information.
Another aspect is that many global audiences have been primed to interact with news as entertainment rather than as information. The rise of cable news in the 1990s and the privatization of many public broadcasters meant that news media outlets had to prioritize building markets rather than keeping audiences informed. As a result, competition is not just between traditional outlets and online advertisers for advertising revenue, it is also between the outlets themselves in efforts to control market share.
Furthermore, digital technologies have shifted the locus of audience trust. Trust in traditional media relied on the professional practices and standards under which news was generated. Editorial practices like fact-checking and editing were the media’s version of saying ‘this is why you should take our word for it’, so audiences could believe without needing verify for themselves. These mechanisms are all but gone in the social media age, in part because we use these platforms to connect with a range of figures, from people we know offline to celebrities and public figures we only know parasocially.
Intimacy is the foundation of trust within social circles – we trust people because we know them – and social media enables us to feel intimate with nearly anyone we are able to connect with online. Digital media makes parasocial relationships in which intimacy is unilaterally possible – we feel like we know many of the political and public figures that we encounter online and that creates a predisposition to trust what they tell us even without verification. We trust traditional media because we believe that there are things being done to ensure that the news they share is factual. We trust many figures on social media in part because of the false sense of intimacy that makes us feel like they must be trustworthy.
Add to that the size of the audiences that people are able to cultivate online, meaning that even the smallest piece of misinformation can travel and gain currency quickly. In my research, I talk about the networking effect and the amplification effect, and argue that it’s not just the size of digital audiences that matters, but the connections to and influence on various networks that these audiences have, as well as the way analogue outlets pick up on information that is generated online and disseminate it elsewhere.
The Springfield story demonstrates both these characteristics. Were it not picked up by JD Vance and his online network, it arguably would have remained a small local rumour. And when Vance and Trump repeated the claims at rallies and TV debates, they took the claim beyond the digital domain. Once Trump repeated these claims, unchallenged by news anchors, they gained a currency that was difficult to undermine through fact checking.
Big problems, big solutions
The information ecosystem invites us to think systematically about how information is generated and behaves, the agency of audiences in receiving and sharing information and therefore the context required by efforts to address mis- and disinformation. Too many approaches focus on challenging each piece or platform at a time, without thinking about the issue as a whole. The same piece of misinformation might be potent to one audience and inconsequential to another, depending on the history and dynamics of the audience’s context.
In my book Strange and Difficult Times: Notes on a Global Pandemic for example, I write about the role that community health workers play in the rural public health system in Kenya and how crucial they were to undermining Covid-19 misinformation. These community health workers do not exist in wealthier nations – the main elements in the matrix of Covid-19 information are the centralized public health system and the intimate relationships people have with family and friends.
For many in the Majority World the primary healthcare provider is a community health worker who knows them reasonably well and visits them in their home, bringing that official information to an intimate level. The formal health system and intimate relationships trigger different levels of trust, and this third element mitigated the prevalence of misinformation in the Majority World in a way that surprised those in the minority.
To date, much of the institutional response to misinformation has been practices like fact-checking. These have their place in adjusting the connections between various types of misinformation, but to truly get to the bottom of the challenge we have to take a step back and understand the nature of belief and trust.
Why are people primed to believe certain types of information from certain sources and not others? The concept of an information ecosystem opens us up to thinking beyond specific events or even tactics, to thinking systemically about how different elements of our societies interact with each other to produce our individual and shared perspectives on reality. And, perhaps more importantly, they help us to identify quickly and respond from multiple angles instead of just placing all our bets with one approach. Systemic challenges require systemic responses, and looking at misinformation as part of an information ecosystem allows us to develop such an approach.
