Misinformation: Easy to Distribute, Hard to Correct
With the birth of Twitter, Internet culture took a drastic turn. It’s hard to say if it is for better or for worse. 140 characters, mobile apps, and free access to the service enabled all sorts of new and innovative microblogging and information aggregation. Just as fast as someone’s ISP can connect them to Twitter, they can post information about a news article, a picture, a video, their location, what they are doing, who they are with, and all sorts of personal information no one really cares about.
Twitter, however, also enabled people throughout the Arab world to organize mass protests and topple dictatorial leaders and oppressive governments, paving the way for new leadership. This fast acting Internet service has also spurred campaigns like AIDS and Cancer research information sharing, places for political candidates to express views and connect with constituents, and even started a large job market online.
I’d like to discuss Twitter in relation to the Photography as a Weapon article. Hany Farid, a Dartmouth professor and expert on digital photography, brought up research that had been produced about how people perceive information:
“You start putting it out there and saying, “Oh look, this picture? It’s a fake. This picture? It’s a fake.” But you know what people remember? They don’t remember, “It’s a fake.” They remember the picture. And there are psychology studies, when you tell people that information is incorrect, they forget that it is incorrect. They only remember the misinformation. They forget the tag associated with it.”
Twitter also relates to this idea of misinformation being what people remember. I worked for an organization called Resolve, a DC lobbying group that works on East African issues and prepares reports on the actions of regional governments and a rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). In the spring of 2012, Invisible Children, an organization that makes films about the LRA and rebuilds schools in northern Uganda, released a film called “Kony 2012” and began a campaign, of which Resolve was a partner. The campaign went viral and the film was seen by over 125 million people around the world.
Yet some information, mostly passed through services like Twitter, was misinformed, some of them even flat out incorrect, and took a toll on the work that was trying to be done. Trying to correct the information was near impossible, as this misinformation was so counter to what the campaign was all about, people believed it was a scam or a CIA operation. If it wasn’t for the importance of the work we were trying to do, it would have been comical.
This is something that is detrimental to how documentation of world events will be regarded in the future. If misinformation is spread, which is not hard to do the more ridiculous and damning it is, it is hard to correct that information. Humans are hardwired to look for that controversy and be skeptical (which is sometimes a good thing) yet as far as unbiased information is concerned, it will be hard to find when every Joe Shmoe can have access to all sorts of misinformation and have the ability to spread it.
**Disclaimer** These are my personal opinions and I am no longer professionally affiliated with the organizations Invisible Children, Resolve, or other partners of the Kony 2012 campaign. This is purely for a conversation for a class and does not necessarily reflect the views of the above organizations.
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