Intervening Troubled Marketplace of Ideas: How to Redeem Trust in Media and Social Institutions From Pseudo-Information

“Do Not Blame the World. Find a Solution.” Sri Chinmoy

The knowledge established through science, history, and social agreements such as law and policy constitutes the common foundation of civilization. The acquisition and acceptance of such common knowledge as true or legitimate by the members of a society enables trust and delegation, further enacting sustainable civilization. This possession of common knowledge is formed by continuous communication processes among social members: the creation, evaluation, endorsement, education, and acceptance of what information is true or factual.

The common conceptual foundation or informational bedrock is created by certain members of a society (e.g., innovators), then debated and validated by other members and eventually crowned as legitimate fact or truth if it endures the falsification or verification processes. Typically, the creation and validation of new knowledge has been entrusted to social institutions possessing power and resources, such as governments, media, or scientific organizations. These processes involve experts and stakeholders.

The various participants require efficient and effective intermediaries to connect distant, separated social actors and constituents. Modern society has developed and relies on many forms of electronic and mass communication technologies or mass media (e.g., radio, TV, and print media). Mass media have played the main intermediary roles for the debate, approval, officialization, and dissemination of candidate knowledge to common knowledge among social members. These entrusted social institutions and intermediaries enabled the whole process of knowledge foundation for social members in what we call the first information market (Kim & Gil de Zúñiga, 2021).

However, the emergence of social media platforms (e.g., YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) in the mid-2000 has changed how the marketplaces of ideas work. The traditional actors and their roles and power in the creation and trading of established commodities (e.g., facts or information) have been debilitated. The common foundation for civilization is threatened. From a media and communication viewpoint, it is a power shift via a media operational paradigm shift. Specifically, the economy of digital society commodifies lay people’s motivation and capacity. Media content consumers “create-their-own-content” and trade and consume it by themselves. In other words, the main commodities traded in the digital marketplaces of ideas are user-generated content or lay public-produced information such as texts, images, audio, or videos, created/posted by lay people themselves over online platforms and digital networks—a secondary information market (Kim & Gil de Zúñiga, 2021).

Still, traditional social institutions such as governments, mass media, and scientific organizations continue to generate and disseminate their information commodities to lay citizens and publics. However, they are just a small few among many producers and traders; they frequently fail to compete in the secondary digital marketplace of ideas. The main trading brokers, the mass media, are not effective or efficient traders against the parallel billions of lay traders who are themselves both producers and consumers. The sheer number and variety of curated content by digital media users outweighs the presence of mass media content. Furthermore, what information consumers want in the market of ideas is known faster and more specifically by themselves. When many users curate their own tailor-made content environment, mass media producers struggle to compete.

Thus the secondary information market has arisen and now overrules the first information market. Even, the capitalization on user-generated contents is reorganizing marketing and advertising priorities in the secondary marketplaces (e.g., Google-YouTube pays individual YouTubers by popularity). The secondary information markets have dominated the first information market, giving rise to the problem of market subsumption (Kim & Gil de Zúñiga, 2021). And in the debilitated marketplace of ideas, the primary pathogen is pseudo-information.

The Definitions of Pseudo-Information

The field of pseudo-information suffers from a lack of definitional coherence. It includes a plethora of concepts, ranging from all-encompassing terms to more specific and limited ones. While this theoretical breadth may accurately represent the wide range of problems studied by pseudo-information research, it also results in a consistent lack of uniformity in the field. There have been efforts to create a terminological taxonomy to assist in the hierarchization of these phenomena (Meel & Vishwakarma, 2020). The main two concepts of disinformation, which specifically points to the messenger’s intention to harm others, and misinformation, referring to a collateral unintentional harm (Wardle, 2017), are accompanied by terms such as “xisinformation,” when the intention behind sharing the content is not easy to classify (Jack, 2017). But the literature also explores the effects of “fabricated content,” propaganda, “misleading content,” fallacies, rumors, hoaxes, clickbait, satires, and so on (Kapantai et al., 2021). It is common to use hypernyms, such as “information disorder” (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017), “disinformation order” (Bennett & Livingston, 2018), and “information pollution” (Meel & Vishwakarma, 2020) to capture and signal the harsh situations democracies are facing.

However, the problem lies in the fact that many empirical studies introduce ad hoc definitions, which lead the literature to overlap (Kapantai et al., 2021). In order to appreciate the whole range of issues this problematic information produces, a fine-grain approach to address such phenomena might be desirable. However, scientific definitions must be useful in moving the field forward, and simply accepting all of them as ideal can backfire. This broad amalgam of overlapping and inconsistencies could result in a problem for the field if it fails to focus on the problem and diverts on terminological debates (Weeks & Gil de Zúñiga, 2021). We proposed pseudo-information (Kim & Gil de Zúñiga, 2021) as an umbrella term to encompass all kinds of incorrect information, regardless of its ultimate intent to harm. This term helps acknowledge the differences between information, which can range from accurate to inaccurate, and the remaining bits of evaluated knowledge and data (Kim & Grunig, 2011) that do cause harmful consequences in spite of their original fact-based intent.

As we discussed, pseudo-information is not an opposite concept to information; instead, it is embodied within it (Kim & Gil de Zúñiga, 2021, p. 3). As noted above, the terms most widely used by the literature are misinformation and disinformation. While they share similarities, there is also a strong dissimilarity. Both allude to a lack in veracity and truthfulness in the information they describe. However, they acknowledge that the intention of the “sharer or crafter” of such information is a factor just as important as the content itself. Misinformation, in this vein, refers to when possibly harmful information content is shared, but there is no intention to harm (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017). A negative externality for the receiver (i.e., safety/well-being risks, political deception, etc.) can occur, but the user disseminating this content was not deliberatively planning to harm the receiver. The opposite is true for disinformation, where the misleading content serves a particular goal or purpose for the sharer (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017): to distort facts and deceive the receiver. Within this backdrop, we point out that the concept of pseudo-information recognizes this difference, its purpose being to encompass not only these two but the rest of the accompanying or parallel terms listed above. However, the main focus of our approach lies in the harmfulness and negative social externalities resulting from the information content. When harm might be done as a consequence of receiving any given information content, regardless of the sharer’s intentions, we are dealing with pseudo-information.

How to Tackle Pseudo-Information

Pseudo-information poses a tangible threat to democracy. The unprecedented scale and rate at which pseudo-information can spread in our complex media environment have led to the development of an array of efforts to tackle it. Identifying pseudo-information is one side of the coin; how to deal with it is the other. There are three primary approaches available: human-reliant techniques, machine/automatic detection, or the combination of the two. The first mostly refers to online platforms’ moderators and social media teams that review content and users’ reports (Veglis, 2014). Social media and online platforms, like forums such as Reddit or 4chan and group-chatting sites such as Discord, mostly depend on humans to moderate the content to ensure the site’s policies are being complied with. However, pseudo-information moderation is a more complex task, as it requires an information-verification process, discerning the author’s intention, and ascertaining the information’s misleading potential (Stewart, 2021). Automated techniques are the second approach. These methods rely on feature-based detection, such as language processing, the trustworthiness of news sources, metadata, and environmental characteristics (Reis et al., 2019). Most are based on classifiers developed over machine-learning processes and are constrained by cost and time or withheld by for-profit companies (Tucker et al., 2018).

However, to combat the adaptability of “bot” accounts and pseudo-information sharers, these technologies must be regularly retrained by professionals. A third approach can be derived, consisting of human moderators assisted by automated techniques. This process can overcome some of the limitations of relying solely on one technique, such as alleviating the workload of human teams and deciding on already-flagged content by the detecting algorithms. Once issues are identified, solutions for social media can involve tweaking the algorithms behind users’ feeds (Lazer et al., 2018) to place pseudo-information in lower positions, deleting the problematic content, or flagging/tagging it visibly. There are also general strategies, such as Twitter’s prompt to read a news article before sharing its URL (Twitter Support, 2020) or providing users with tips on how to identify pseudo-information (Sparks & Frishberg, 2020). Regarding the accounts that share pseudo-information, social media platforms can restrict them temporarily, block them permanently, or reduce their visibility (Crowell, 2017). Nonetheless, moderation such as deletion and flagging techniques involves the dilemma of free speech. Some users will think that removing content from the platforms they use is a form of censorship that violates freedom of information and speech (Schraer, 2022).

Implications for Democracy: An Ill-Informed Society

One of the major threats that pseudo-information poses for democracy is the risk of engendering an ill-informed society (Kim & Gil de Zúñiga, 2023). On complex issues such as casting a vote for an election, ascribing to a political party, or participating in political protests, citizens should rely on factual information before forming an opinion or making a participatory decision. But the current spread of pseudo-information threatens this process, as false information can affect our behavior (Bastick, 2021) and even spread faster than the truth (Vosoughi et al., 2018).

An ill-informed society suggests citizens will change their minds politically on the basis of false information, leading them not only to make naïve or uninformed decisions, but wrongly informed decisions. The latter leaves the door open for foreign powers to interfere in domestic political events or policy debates and for radical groups to increase their reach (Bennett & Livingston, 2018). In addition to citizens, officials and representatives could make decisions on the grounds of pseudo-information. Research has explored the role and effects of politicians on pseudo-information spread (e.g., Farhall, 2019; Swire-Thompson et al., 2020). Although elected representatives are assisted by teams of advisors and legislation is a long process, they are not immune. Climate change policies or immigration laws are polarizing issues and prone to false information (Hameleers & van der Meer, 2020), as is public health (Roozenbeek et al., 2020). In the fight against pseudo-information, we need politicians to be aware of the problem and aware that they can suffer from it too. However, awareness and conscientiousness raise another problem, regarding how we think of how pseudo-information affects others. Drawing from the presumed media influence and third-person effect literature, researchers have developed the concept of presumed influence of misinformation (PIM) on others, or PIM (Nisbet et al., 2021). They found that a higher PIM leads to a higher support of censorship and regulation against misinformation (Baek et al., 2019; Ho et al., 2020). However, it has been suggested that PIM effects might go beyond censoring pseudo-information, possibly leading to dissatisfaction with democracy (Nisbet et al., 2021).

Studies in the Current Volume:

Conclusions

In 2021, Vol. 65(2), we identified pseudo-information as one of the most threatening challenges for media and civil society. We have attempted to theorize and conceptually explicate how the competition of two parallel markets creates the market subsumption problem, and why this is a major cause for the digital information market failure. Information crisis and trust crisis are mutual causes and consequences. Losing trust in social institutions creates an information crisis; an information crisis creates a greater trust crisis for social institutions.

In a truth-be-damned era with the problem of market subsumption, the digitalized marketplace of ideas trades an increasing volume of false information alongside facts and true information. Digital idea market failure is almost inevitable. Pseudo-information outpaces true information in its diffusion, influential power, embeddedness, stickiness, and negation of the extant belief systems of its bearers. Truth hardly prevails—the digital information market fails too often.

Early in Vol. 65(2), we tried to redefine the problem theoretically, with a belief that “if we define the problem correctly, we almost have the solution” (Steve Jobs). In our current issue, we collect a set of progressive conceptual and empirical solutions in response to the earlier theorization and redefinition of problems such as pseudo-information, information market processes, and lay informatics in the secondary marketplaces of ideas. The studies we compile and present in this issue can prime the pump of newer and bolder prescriptions to tackle the pathogen of pseudo-information which threatens civil society and democracy.