“And that’s how Limburger cheese is produced.”
As I finished my story, my English professor sat across from me with a very skeptical look in his eye. “That can’t be true,” he said.
“It is,” I replied. “I’ve seen it myself. Researchers at the Vet School at Washington State [University] found a way to extract milk from lizards, then they process the milk into cheese. You should see it. It’s amazing.”
“I don’t know. How do they produce cheese at scale?”
“More lizards? Bigger facilities? Who knows? But it works,” I answered. “You’ve got to see it to believe it.”
And he believed it. I could tell the story with a perfectly straight face and, as ludicrous as the story was I could convince just about anyone that people were milking lizards in a university laboratory. Forget the fact that lizards don’t produce milk. People love a good story and if you can spin it well enough, they’ll believe just about anything. Even well-educated people who should know better.
The Roots of Disinformation
Disinformation is nothing new. Sun Tzu probably would have chuckled to himself to see us work ourselves up over fake news. In its most basic form, it’s the act of deliberately spreading false information to deceive or otherwise influence people and behavior. As long as we’ve had spoken language, people have used disinformation to get ahead in some way – to gain a competitive advantage, to convince people to part with their hard-earned money, or to compel certain behaviors. And while my own efforts were intended for entertainment purposes only (albeit, at someone else’s expense), they were still a form of disinformation.
We like to think that we exist in an era where “fake news” is spinning our world off its axis. But to be fair, this is by no means a new phenomenon. In their book, The Roots of Fake News, authors Brian and Matthew Winston document centuries of disinformation spread through the vehicle of fake news. They argue – much to the chagrin of those who contend that social media is the root of all evil – fake news is not driven by the internet or shoddy reporting but is rooted in the ideological foundations of the journalism profession itself: neutrality, objectivity, and the quest for the truth. And, as we are all painfully aware, the truth can often mean different things to different people at different moments in time.
In her article, “The Ago-Old Problem of ‘Fake News’,” Jackie Mansky reminds us that disinformation in the media has been “part of the conversation as far back as the birth of the free press.” Writing in Smithsonian Magazine in 2018, she recalls President John Adams reading Condorcet’s Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind, in which the Frenchman asserts that an objective truth will emerge in a press free of censorship. Alongside that particular passage, Adams scribbled notes in the margins, “There has been more new error propagated by the press in the last ten years than in an hundred years before 1798.”
One person’s objective truth, it seems, can be another’s fake news.
The Threat of Disinformation
We like to blame the media for our challenges with disinformation, but the media is just one part of a much wider problem. While the quest for an objective truth is a worthy ideal, there are just as many media outlets (and influencers, in general) that are more focused on influencing opinions and behaviors than anything that vaguely resembles the truth. And social media has provided those outlets and individuals with a convenient means to spread their disinformation to a much broader audience. But, again, that’s just part of the problem.
The root of the problem? We’ll get to that. Where this leads, though, is just as much of a concern. In a recent CNET article, author Bree Fowler adds context to the deeper threat of disinformation, highlighting the impact of fake news on the elections process. As we approach midterm elections in this country, false claims of election fraud – a persistent theme since the 2020 election – still plague local and state offices. A constant stream of Freedom of Information Act requests (most of which feature the same copied-and-pasted text), phone calls, and in-person visits are overwhelming already limited staffs at a time when we need their focus on the election process.
And that’s just one example. Disinformation poses an equally great threat on the private sector. In a 2019 event hosted by the American Bar Association, former intelligence officer Matthew Ferraro spoke at length on the threat of disinformation, citing an online campaign against Starbucks advertising “Dreamer Day,” when undocumented immigrants would be provided free drinks. For a global brand, the financial implications of a successful disinformation campaign can be catastrophic.
More recently, the world saw for themselves how Russian President Vladimir Putin used disinformation as part of his campaign against Ukraine. In fact, Russian disinformation – and its subsequent spread – were as much a part of their operational planning as any form of traditional maneuver. Ukraine’s ability to successfully counter those disinformation efforts proved essential to gaining international support while ensuring that Putin was further isolated as a despotic pariah.
But the root of the problem runs much deeper. We like to focus blame on the sources of disinformation, when they are just a symptom of a much deeper problem. The problem is us. The truth is, as P.T. Barnum famously said, “There’s a sucker born every day.” In the wake of the 2016 U.S. election cycle – which saw a frightening surge in foreign interference – Psychology Today was warning of an “emerging crisis in critical thinking.” A crisis, according to the late Stanford Professor Paul Hurd, driven by “too many facts, too little conceptualizing, too much memorizing, and too little thinking.”
The solution to our problem has always been right in front of our eyes. If we want to limit the spread and influence of disinformation, we need to teach people how to think for themselves, to weigh facts on their merit, to judge an argument for its worth. We need to stop allowing others to tell us what to think. We need to decide for ourselves which facts matter and weigh the truth based on those facts rather than emotions or opinions. And we need to stop letting the loudest, most obnoxious voices decide the outcome of a debate. We need to find our critical-thinking skills and exercise them a little more often.
If we don’t do it – and soon – a lot more suckers are going to born. A lot more people will fall prey to disinformation. And a lot more people are going to travel the country looking for lizard-milk dairies.
